The clasp doesn’t click anymore. It sort of sighs into place, a tired metal-on-metal sound that he recognizes from the background noise of his childhood. His father’s briefcase. It sits on the dining room table, looking smaller than he remembers, a scuffed leather rectangle holding 48 years of a life he only partially witnessed.

He runs a finger over a dark, misshapen stain near the handle. That was the ’98 negotiation. A Styrofoam cup of terrible coffee, spilled in a moment of either panic or triumph. His dad never clarified which, and now the stain is the only historian left to tell the tale. A deep scratch arcs across the front flap-Heathrow tarmac, 1988, a frantic rush to catch a connecting flight. Each flaw is a footnote. Each worn corner, a chapter heading.

We are, almost all of us, terrified of this language. We’ve been taught that pristine is the goal. We buy cases to protect our phones, sleeves for our laptops, special cloths to wipe away the fingerprints of our own existence. We live in a state of perpetual preservation, trying to keep things in the exact condition they were in at the moment of purchase. It’s a losing battle, and a foolish one. We treat our possessions like museum exhibits we’re not allowed to touch, and in doing so, we rob them of their one true purpose: to live alongside us. To absorb our lives.

I’m a hypocrite, of course. I’ll say all this and then go online and buy a brand-new notebook with a perfect, uncreased cover because the old one is dog-eared and coffee-stained. Two weeks ago, I threw out my wallet. It was a beautiful piece of leather I’d had for over a decade. The card slots were stretched into unique, slouching shapes. The edges were dark and burnished from the friction of a thousand pockets. It was, by all objective measures, ruined. I replaced it with a crisp, rigid, impeccably stitched new one. And for the first 48 hours, I hated it. It felt like a stranger in my pocket. It knew nothing about me. I’d committed an act of manufactured amnesia, swapping a decade of tactile memory for the sterile pleasure of ‘new’.

My friend Flora K.-H. would understand. She’s a hospice volunteer coordinator, and her job, in a strange way, is to curate the final vocabulary of a person’s life. When everything else is gone, when the person is gone, what remains are their things. And she told me something I’ve never forgotten: the heirs never fight over the expensive stuff. Not really. The jewelry, the stocks, the silver-that’s all paperwork. The real battles, the tearful, desperate negotiations, are over the chipped ceramic mug, the threadbare reading socks, the ridiculously ugly armchair with the permanent imprint of its owner.

She once mediated a dispute between two grieving sisters over their mother’s gardening trowel. It was rusty, the wooden handle worn smooth and dark in the exact shape of their mother’s grip. It was worthless. It was priceless. That trowel held more of their mother’s story than her diamond earrings ever could. The earrings were just a record of a financial transaction. The trowel was a record of a life.

We’ve outsourced our memory to the cloud, to digital photos that we scroll past with numb indifference. We have thousands of images but no objects. We have a gallery, but no artifacts. Think about the things you own. If your house were to stand for another hundred years, what in it would tell a future generation who you were? Your particle-board bookshelf? Your fast-fashion sweater that will disintegrate in 8 years? Your phone, which will be an obsolete brick in 28 months? It’s a terrifyingly short list.

This isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about building a tangible history. It’s about an object earning its keep, becoming a member of the family. This requires a shift in how we acquire things in the first place. It means choosing things that are built to withstand a life, not just a season. Things made of leather that softens, metal that patinas, wood that darkens. We’ve forgotten how to buy things that are meant to be scarred, things designed to absorb stories. It’s not just a watch or a leather good, but even something as personal as one of those artisanal men’s ties made to be passed down, collecting stories with every knot and every accidental spill from a wedding or a nerve-wracking interview. An object like that isn’t disposable; it’s an apprentice biographer.

There’s this odd trend I’ve noticed in home decor magazines-pre-distressed furniture. Companies spend millions on machines and chemicals to fake the very thing we should be creating ourselves: a history. They sell us jeans with fake rips and tables with artificial wormholes. It’s like buying a book of someone else’s vacation photos. The entire point is missed.

Flora works with people who have, at most, a few hundred hours left. She has seen more endings than anyone I know. She says people at the end of their lives don’t ask to see their diplomas or their bank statements. They ask for the afghan their grandmother knitted, the one with the pulled thread from when the cat got its claw stuck in it back in ’88. They ask for the wooden spoon they used to teach their child to bake, its handle now warped from the heat of 238 batches of cookies. They ask for the physical evidence of love, of effort, of time.

I’m trying to get better at this. I’m trying to resist the siren song of the pristine. It’s a conscious rebellion against the culture of disposability that leaves us with full trash cans and empty histories. It’s about seeing a scratch not as a flaw to be buffed out, but as a word you didn’t know you were writing. A water ring on a table isn’t damage; it’s the memory of a late-night conversation, a shared bottle of wine, a moment of laughter. It’s a language. We’ve just forgotten how to read it.

He picks up the briefcase. The leather is cool and supple under his hands. For a moment, he considers sending it to a specialist to have it restored-the scratches filled, the stain lifted, the clasp fixed. To make it new again. But the thought vanishes as quickly as it comes. It would be an act of erasure. A desecration. Instead, he opens it. The hinges groan their familiar protest. He puts his laptop inside, next to a half-read paperback and a set of keys. He closes the lid, the sighing clasp settles into place, and he walks out the door, ready to write the next sentence.”