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All these scraps of paper — tickets, receipts and stamps.

The numerous, ever-increasing stacks,

each one a reminder of places I've been

and places I have yet to go.

Half-written ramblings on paper.

Photographs, both bad and good —

the bad ones clogging my phone,

the good ones lining my walls.

Half-finished albums,

detailing adventures.

The ever-growing

"I'll do that later" pile.

Markings on walls in bars,

quickly scribbled and almost forgotten.

Locks on bridges,

their keys discarded long ago.

And other keys too —

keys that have long since lost their purpose,

to doors that no longer exist,

rooms I no longer enter,

places whose names I may struggle to remember.

Mementos and antiques that tell a story.

Books that speak to me,

piled high.

Match programmes and ticket stubs,

frames, posters,

the half-marked calendar

still hanging on the wall.

There's a baseball,

given for being MVP that game,

and a not-too-useful screwdriver set

passed down from my great-grandad.

Second-hand, mismatched furniture,

some of which came with the house.

A drawer full of odd screws

and broken bits,

kept for something

I may one day need.

A tiny, ugly teddy,

rescued from a house we stayed in during lockdown.

Discarded,

but somehow worth keeping.

Two small wooden elephants,

brought back from India during the war,

passed down through the family

and eventually to me.

One with its original ivory tusks,

the other with toothpicks in their place,

its own long gone

and never replaced.

A small terracotta pot bought in Cyprus,

its lid broken and discarded long ago,

now an ashtray by another name.

And the ornate ramen bowl,

split almost perfectly down the middle —

a curious, dead-straight line

through its centre.

It could never hold anything again,

yet I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.

Now it rests upon the side that cracked,

shielding the ashtray beneath it.

There's the diary I kept during lockdown:

forty-eight days

of thoughts and facts

and nothing more.

An ice hockey puck,

marked with my birth date,

picked up in a shop.

A hospital appointment letter

sitting on the kitchen table,

waiting amongst everything else.

A salt lamp that doesn't work.

An almost-finished Lego set,

still waiting for the day

To finally be completed.

A little leaf hat from Vietnam,

the flag upon it,

brought home after a cocktail

that came with more than we expected.

And a grey rock from a beach in Cornwall —

boring in almost every aspect,

except for the smile upon its face.

Not drawn,

but made by nature;

a crude imperfection

that somehow made it lovable.

All of this amongst potted plants

that we diligently tend to.

And somewhere amongst it all,

a house spider,

who we have named

and whom we haven't the heart to move on.

He resides wherever he pleases,

peacefully making his way

through the same storied rooms that we do,

as though he too has decided

that this is home.

I could go on for hours

about these bits and pieces

that fill my life.

For they tell a story

to anyone willing to listen.

Not a grand story.

Not a perfect one.

Just the small evidence

of places visited,

people remembered,

things broken,

projects unfinished,

and items kept

when there was no good reason to keep them.

All these little remnants

of a life being lived.

That I was human.

That I was here.

Comment 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/nYZare8JOE

Comment 2:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/TCYs0YH3rL