BB Grey–musings

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Today’s Prompt: Do You Have Any Collections?

I’ve collected things, sure. Baseball cards, once. Matchboxes, briefly, though I’m still not sure what possessed me to start that one. Maybe it was the smallness of them, easy to gather, easy to lose. Like most things that felt important once and now sit in some dusty box in the attic of memory, if not the garage.

But if I’m being honest,and what’s the point if I’m not?—the collection I’ve stuck with longest is a well-curated, sometimes alphabetized archive of failures and successes.

It’s a strange collection. You can’t sell it on eBay. No one comes by to admire it in a glass case. But it’s there, always with me. Some of those failures are like rare coins, pressed and polished by time. I take them out now and then, mostly when I’m about to try something new, just to remind myself what falling flat feels like. They’re not pleasant, but they’re honest. They whisper things like, “Remember when you thought that would work?” or “Bold move, wrong audience.” I keep them for reasons I can’t always explain, maybe as proof I survived, maybe because I secretly believe every bad chapter is a prelude to a better one.

Right beside them, on the better-lit shelf, are the successes. They shine a little more, though not always louder. These are the quiet victories, the ones that didn’t come with confetti or applause but mattered more because no one else saw them. A relationship I salvaged. A job I finished despite everything falling apart. That one time I actually flossed for an entire month.

Each one sits on the imaginary shelf I keep in my head, like trophies. Not the kind you dust every week, but the kind that remind you—you’ve been through things. You did things. You mattered.

Isn’t that what life is? A kind of cluttered museum of what we got wrong and what we miraculously got right? The filler fades. We forget what we had for dinner last Tuesday or which errands we ran three Saturdays ago. But we remember how it felt to win, and more vividly, how it felt to lose. The mind’s funny that way, merciful and cruel. It erases some scars and highlights others. Sometimes the worst memories show up uninvited, just to remind you how far you’ve come. Or how far you haven’t. Depends on the day.

So yes, I collect. Not stamps or bottle caps, not Pokémon cards or porcelain cats. I collect life experiences—every dent and crack and shining moment. They don’t rip. They don’t tear. They grow more valuable the more I look at them. And the weight of them? That’s up to me. Some days they’re light as a laugh. Other days they press against my ribs like the world’s heaviest backpack. But they’re mine.

And unlike matchboxes, I never lose interest in those.

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