Inheritance of Oddities: A Catalogue of the Self

(a disassembly, a confession, a vortex catalog of my sacred clutter)

What do I hold
close—close as breath, closer than blood,
the things not stolen by memory or moth,
the objects that blink in the dark when no one's looking?

Let me open this museum of stray thoughts,
not with keys
but with the spit of yesterday's rain on the window of this aching brain—
yes, come in.

Step over the shoelaces tangled in old dreams.
Ignore the cobwebs made of sighs,
tread lightly on the soft bellies of regrets
that curl and uncurl like cats under moonlight.

Step deeper.
See the sticky notes of unsaid apologies
hanging from doorknobs of memory.
Run your fingers across the wallpaper—
it’s made of conversations that never found endings.

Every corner hums a lullaby of half-formed choices.
This is where forgotten prayers sit beside empty envelopes
addressed to no one.
Even the dust here has names.

There is
a cracked ceramic owl.
Gifted by a girl who tasted like lemon chips
and left in June.
She said wisdom lives in owls.
I think sorrow nests in ceramic.

Its left eye fell out
when I dropped it during a phone call with Death
(disguised as my uncle from Patna).

Now it stares sideways,
half-seeing, fully remembering.
It sits on my shelf like a sentinel of splintered affection,
a god of accidents and unfinished conversations.

Sometimes, late at night, I whisper to it.
It never answers, but something in me shifts.
Perhaps it listens in the way only broken things can—
completely, without expectation.

And though it's chipped, I dust it gently,
as one might tend to wounds long healed
but never forgotten.
It knows too much to be discarded.

Next:
a scarf.
Not mine, not anyone's really.
It arrived in my life
wrapped around a November wind,
left behind by a lover who disappeared mid-sentence.
Still smells like peppermint.
I do not wash it.
I do not wear it.
I fold it in grief and unfold it in longing.

The threads whisper in sleep:
“You are the museum of the unfinished.”
It’s long enough to wrap around memory,
but never long enough to bridge the distance between then and now.

When I hold it,
I remember the kiss that didn't land,
the apology that got caught in a throat.
The scarf carries their breath,
and mine, suspended in invisible embroidery.

Some days, I wrap it around a pillow
just to simulate warmth.
Some nights, I imagine it's a flag
planted on a conquered hill of heartbreak.

Inside a matchbox —yes, a matchbox—
lives a broken SIM card.
It once held
a thousand I-love-yous
and one last I-don’t.

Useless.
Sacred.
It reminds me I once believed in connection
stronger than signal towers,
stronger than ego.

Now I carry it like a relic—
my own Saint of Lost Texts.
I sometimes hold it up to my ear,
as if echoes of past digital intimacy
could still vibrate through bone.

I imagine it humming,
vibrating with ghostly pings
of sent emojis and missed calls.
I imagine it forgiving me
for every text I never sent.

This matchbox altar—
pocket-sized mourning,
a tiny crypt for my thumb’s declarations
and silences that now seem too loud.

A notebook
half written,
half erased.

I wrote poems in it during my lunchtime at work,
while pretending to chew dignity.
Each word is fossil,
each page a splinter of a self I barely recall—
so young, so wounded, so full of misplaced metaphors.

There is a bloodstain on page 23.
Paper cut or emotional hemorrhage?
Even I don’t know.
But the ink circled it like a halo.

The cover is warped from coffee spills and panic.
Margins hold the footprints of ants
who once marched over my metaphors,
probably unimpressed.

That notebook?
It holds the smell of resignation letters never submitted,
the faint smear of tears disguised as smudged ink.
It contains my rehearsed courage
and actual fears folded neatly between lines.

There are words crossed out so violently
they look like battlegrounds.
Sometimes I flip it open just to remember
how I once survived with verse.

I own
a box of buttons.

Each one from a shirt
that no longer fits the man I became.
Each one from a moment
that popped off under pressure:
arguments, hurried dressing,
midnight undressing.

They clink like secrets
when I shake the box.
Little circular oracles.
Hard to decipher, harder to discard.

Sometimes I try to match them to shirts I no longer have,
just to see if time still lies in threads.

Each button holds tension.
One from a first date.
One from the day I walked out
and forgot to close the door behind me.

I tell myself I’ll sew them onto something new.
But I know—they belong only to the garments of memory,
unwearable,
but somehow, never out of season.

A wristwatch—dead battery, still ticking in my mind.
It doesn’t tell time anymore,
but it still tells stories.
It once sat snug on my grandfather’s pulse,
his wrist a map of pale constellations,
veins like faded rivers, his skin smelling of aftershave and silence.

Now it ticks only when I dream.
I wear it on days I need protection from time itself,
a shield made of seconds no longer accounted for.
The strap is torn where memory clings hardest.

I remember the day he took it off,
pressed it into my palm like a benediction,
and said nothing.
It was a ceremony of inheritance without fanfare,
a quiet gift passed between heartbeats.

Now, I do not wear it to tell time.
I wear it to remember it can stop—and so can pain.
When people ask, I say, "It runs on ghosts and goodbyes."

Photographs, yes—those fading rectangles of light.
A shoebox full. Tied with a ribbon
that belonged to a blouse someone once wore to a wedding I did not attend.
Each photo—a freeze-frame of laughter long fled.

They are curling at the corners, yellowing like old secrets.
The people in them smile at me through the fog of yesterday.
Some are strangers now.
Some never were anything else.

I study faces for signs of prophecy.
I look into eyes to see if they knew what was coming.
In one, I am holding a balloon.
In another, I am the balloon—full of helium, about to slip.

I stack them in accidental timelines.
Birthdays, funerals, the third Tuesday of that odd summer.
I stare until I almost hear the voices,
the clicking shutter that captured more than just light.

They’re proof I once mattered to someone.
Proof that even vanishing has a shape.
They hold the soft evidence of vanished days,
and I, their last loyal archivist.

A single earring.
Its twin lost in a cab ride where my head leaned too close to forgetting.
It’s shaped like a moon droplet,
bought from a street artist who spoke only in rhymes.

It dangles from a corkboard now,
a lone pendulum of what-could-have-been.
Sometimes I wear it anyway,
just to unbalance myself deliberately.

It glints when caught by sun,
and every glint is a gasp of an old giggle,
a midnight that ended in silence too loud.
I tell people it’s a style statement.

Really, it’s a punctuation mark
for a sentence never finished.
One earring is not half of a pair—
it is a whole memory choosing to remain asymmetrical.

A tea cup.
Stained. Chipped. Beloved.
It’s not bone china, not heirloom, not antique.
It’s from a roadside dhaba where poetry first touched my tongue.

That first sip—milky, over-boiled, spiced just right.
I drank and understood the meaning of warmth
as revolution.
The cup fits perfectly in my palm, like a secret.

It has held more tears than tea since then.
Some cracks were caused by time,
some by me, some by hands that left.
Still, it refuses to leak.

Resilient crockery.
A metaphor too tired, too precise.
I sip from it on days when the world feels breakable.
It reminds me I’m not the only thing that’s been dropped and endured.

An umbrella with a crooked spine.
Its fabric torn where monsoon and memory collided.
It saved me once from a deluge I didn’t see coming—
not the one from the sky, but from within.

I carry it still, even on sunny days.
Not for rain.
But for the shade it offers from nostalgia,
from the glaring sun of could-haves.

It opens with a shudder, like an old man rising from sleep.
Each spoke a lesson in holding on.
The handle still smells of that railway platform
where someone said goodbye and forgot to look back.

I know it’s easier to buy a new one.
But new things don’t speak in dialects of survival.
This one? It speaks fluently.
And I still listen.

A film ticket.
Faded ink. Corner torn.
I watched alone that day,
but felt less lonely for ninety-three minutes.

It was a foreign film. Subtitled.
Something about longing across language.
Halfway through, I forgot to read.
I understood anyway.

Now the ticket is my passport to solitude.
I carry it in my wallet like a pressed flower.
It flutters when I open it,
like the ghost of popcorn laughter.

It’s not the film I remember.
It’s the feeling of choosing myself that day.
And the tiny rebellion of staying for the credits.
Because I wanted to read every name.

A pencil sharpener shaped like a turtle.
Childhood clings to its edges.
It once lived in a geometry box,
surrounded by blunt pencils and misplaced decimals.

Now it lives in my drawer,
amidst adult things that forgot how to play.
But sometimes, when deadlines press down like rain,
I use it to sharpen my will.

It’s not the sharpener I need.
It’s the slowness of that turtle.
The patience. The home-on-back resilience.
It never ran, but always arrived.

So I keep it.
Let it remind me that acceleration is not always evolution.
That progress sometimes hums in slow circles,
and childlike tools still carve purpose.

A receipt from a bookstore.
Books I bought and never finished.
Titles underlined. Totals scribbled.
I keep it like a promise half-kept.

That day, the cashier smiled like a comma.
Paused me into believing I was building a future
made of paragraphs.
I walked home hugging paper.

Now the receipt is sun-bleached,
its ink disappearing like old friends.
But I remember.
The rustle of pages. The scent of inked intentions.

It’s not what I read.
It’s what I wanted to become—
a person who finishes books,
a person who begins with curiosity and ends with clarity.

A threadbare t-shirt.
Worn out at the collar, stretched at the sleeves.
No brand. No slogan.
But it fits like a second skin.

I wore it on the day I failed spectacularly.
I wore it on the night I danced alone in the kitchen.
It’s seen despair and defiance,
and held both without judgment.

Sometimes fabric remembers better than we do.
It carries salt from sweat and tears,
tells the body, "You are still home."
It whispers resilience in cotton threads.

I could throw it away.
But then who would remember those silent victories?
I fold it carefully, as one might fold history.
Sacred. Threaded. Undeniably mine.

An empty jar labeled "Hope."
A gift from myself.
It once held post-it notes of dreams,
written in crayon, some smudged with chocolate.

Now it’s empty—by choice.
Because hope isn’t stored. It’s summoned.
I place it near the window so light can fill it.
It glows some mornings.

People laugh. Call it silly.
But they don’t know what it held.
Or what it survived.
The weight of what was once believed.

Sometimes I lift the lid and breathe in,
as if hope has a scent.
It does.
It smells like survival.

And so I carry these things—
the useless, the sacred, the unquantifiable.
Not for nostalgia, not for pain.
But because I am their only witness.

They ask for nothing.
Only to be remembered.
To be held.
To be named in poems like this.

These belongings—
not prized, not precious to the world—
but essential to the architecture of my becoming.

I don’t collect them. They collect me.
Every thread, every shard, every echo—
a compass made of broken stars.

And I follow.
Always, I follow.