Earned

I collect things.

Not seriously. Not with the discipline of someone who knows what they are doing. But with the particular weakness of a person who cannot walk past an old thing without wanting to know where it has been.

The older the better. The more damaged, the more interesting.

A bowl with a crack running through it. A leather chair worn thin at the armrests. A photograph so faded the faces are almost gone — almost, but not quite. These are the things I slow down for.

We have a word for it. Patina. The sheen that comes not from newness but from time. From handling. From the slow accumulation of all the moments the object passed through without anyone noticing.

You cannot manufacture patina. The fake is always detectable. It has the right texture and the wrong feeling. The real thing took decades. The real thing cost something.

We have auction houses dedicated to what time does to wine. We have entire museums built around what time does to stone. We travel to stand in front of ruins and go quiet.

We have a skincare industry built around making sure time does none of that to us.

I think about the bowl with the crack. How the crack is the most interesting thing about it. How it is the proof of a life — something happened here, something broke, something was held together anyway.

How you cannot have that without the breaking.