Prompt: Write about 3 objects currently on your person, for 5 minutes each, then write a conclusion that ties them all together in some way.
SHOE: I bought you a few scant weeks ago, oh paragon of shoe investments. Since then, I’ve taken you hundreds of miles from your homeland, from your native country of Bend to my home in the valley. Whisking you away like a mail-order bride from everything you once knew for a paltry sum of $25. In the few weeks we’ve been together, we’ve seen towns 300 miles from here, and you have done your duty of protecting my feet admirably and stoically. Through dust and crowds, at concerts and classrooms, you have shielded me from harm as no spouse ever could. No woman should ever be in need of a man with a good pair of footwear to her name.
TATTOO: You turned three years old a few days ago. I remember the day we came together, how excited I was and yet how nervous, like a bride before her wedding. Silly actually, to act like a nervous bride at what would be my second wedding, I who should be an old hand at this having done it before. You were my second tattoo, and the most beautiful of the pair, but please do not tell your companion on my back. I find that he is defensive of his position as the first, with the self-assured possessiveness of an ex-boyfriend who knows he was your first love. You may be beautiful, Kanji Symbol, but the Tribal and I have history.
PEN: I owe much in this class to you, Black Papermate Visibility. Your soft rubber grip comforts my awkward left-handedness. Without your smooth-rolling and unsmudgeable ink, my insistence on writing with the nonconformist hand would turn out much messier. Let others glorify their space-age gel ink pens; those do little for me but smear wildly, streaking across the page and leaving the edge of my palm stained a bruising black, as if I have been banging desperately on a door for entrance. Your stoic humility serves my needs well, and the clicking you make as I lower and raise the ballpoint makes such a satisfyingly irritating sound. Surely, you are the king of all writing utensils.
Conclusion: It’s interesting how we personify objects. Is it because we place so much importance on the things we surround ourselves with? We speak of how Americans become ‘married’ to things, how we invest ourselves in items or projects. Is this how we rationalize our attachments to them? People love their cars. They love their shoes, their computers, their vacuums. How odd that we feel the need to try and absolve our guilt over placing such monument on things by humanizing them. We describe our items as we would spouses; reliable, convenient, loyal, comforting. I wonder if it is only in America that our consumerism can begin to eclipse the institution of matrimony.
