What is this?
Why is it here?
What do I expect from this moment?
In a world obsessed with optimization, it feels radical to allow an object to simply interrupt, to refuse usefulness, to exist without explanation.
Especially in a kitchen. Especially by the sink.
The Thing Itself
I still don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe it is a known object with a practical purpose I haven’t discovered. Maybe it was a prototype. Maybe it was made by someone with access to a machine shop and a sense of humor. Maybe it was a gift.
But I like not knowing.
I like that it resists being categorized. I like that it looks like one thing and is unmistakably another. I like that it was found, not bought new. That it carried a life before mine and now quietly overlaps with it.
Every estate sale object is a fragment of a story. Most of them fade into utility again—plates become plates, chairs become chairs.
This one refuses to disappear into function.
And maybe that’s why I keep thinking about it.
Because in the most ordinary place in the house, it reminds me that not everything has to make sense to be worth keeping.
Sometimes it’s enough to notice the weight of something unexpected in your hand—and let it stay strange.
