It will be an emotional occasion. I still miss some of them, and I imagine, there will be hard feelings on their part. Why wasn’t I more careful, less absent minded? I’ll tell them how much I beat myself up about their disappearance. But in the end, that can’t change the outcome.
I will ask what happened after we parted ways. Perhaps they wound up belonging to somebody who took better care of them. I hope so. I’d hate to think of all of them heading straight to a landfill.
Our relationship was always a two-way street. Yes, I got use out of them, but it was me who released them from the limbo of inventory and gave them a role in the world.
But in the end there will be no avoiding this awkward question: did I ever replace them? For some the answer will be “yes” and I hope that answer is taken as evidence of their importance and not an indication that they are mere commodities. For the rest there may be a brief surge of pride that comes from being labelled “irreplaceable”. But that could soon be followed by this troubling thought: perhaps I had decided that I didn’t really need them.
Possession, after all, is often the result of appetite and desire, and not necessity. And this reckoning of whether you need something or merely like it, is something that ought to be done in this life and not in whatever comes next.
With a Perspective, I’m Paul Staley.
Paul Staley lives in San Francisco.
