Ephemera

There are a number of things on my floor, and they’re all important. A cicada skin. An empty film canister. Some iridescent cellophane, the sticker from an orange and a playing card —the Joker— with the bottom right corner missing, a pale yellow paper crown from a Christmas cracker, two tiny, misshapen glass bottles, and about a half-dozen different dried leaves and flowers: ginkgo, birch, hydrangea. All these in various stages of intactness. They’re all stored together in a box I keep under my bed, a mismatched array of ephemera I’ve made permanent, all representing a specific memory— a place, moment, person. 

I’ve long been collecting things that would otherwise be quickly lost or forgotten. The cicada skin is from a hike when I was ten, the sole survivor of a collection of five, guarded in my cupped hands until I got home. The misshapen bottles are from when I was seven, found in the backyard garden. The sticker is from fall 2019, from an unseasonably warm day in September friends and I spent bouncing between laying in the sun and running to the dining hall for oranges. All these objects I’ve kept in one place, filing them away as they occurred, hoping to hold on to memories, some good some bad, looking back on them as a collective every few years. 

I’ve been finding myself here more frequently since the pandemic started; sitting on the floor of my bedroom pouring over memories, trying to absorb the unintentional traces of my life, the finger-smudged graphite and folded corners of paper. These objects are all, primarily, symbols. They help keep a catalog of my experiences safe from faulty memory. These items are neither distinctly beautiful nor functional; they appear to be valuable solely because of the memory they represent.

But they're more than that. While originally saved to represent a distinct moment, they’ve evolved beyond their memory. They’ve moved from house to house as I have, kept under the bed and on bookshelves, tucked away and occasionally shown off to friends. They’ve been in cars and countries, corners torn and taped together, creases smoothed. These objects evolve with me, age with me, their original purpose remaining while parts are taken away, added, modified. They become current as they remain with me, showing not just the moment they were extracted from, but everything after. 

As we get older things fade; floorplans disintegrate and new ones are built, old faces blur as new ones become familiar. Ephemera can become an external hard drive, storing and preserving moments in time otherwise likely to disappear. These objects often have minimal importance to us in the moment, but they are foundational to an experience, a memory, a person, a place; they’re the component parts that make up our world. 

More than anything I write down or any picture I take, these objects —a cicada skin, torn papers, produce stickers— are a definitive marker of notable points in my life that continue to evolve with me; a living document.