A Collection of Connection… and rocks

Do you have any collections?

When people ask if I collect anything, I usually say books. It’s the simplest answer. The cleanest. It doesn’t open too many doors.

But that’s not really the truth, is it?

The truth is, I’ve collected a lot of things across my life. Books, yes. Comic books—three thousand of them once, when I was young and obsessed and searching for something to anchor me in the chaos of childhood. Then gone. Vanished to a storage unit auction after my mother passed. There’s a sharpness to that kind of loss, like ripping a thread that had stitched you to a younger, more innocent self. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to reclaim that collection. I couldn’t.

And then there were the doom boxes.

You know the kind—shoeboxes, Tupperware, even old Amazon boxes stuffed full of randomness: screws, toy limbs, half-used batteries, keychains with no keys. Little bits of “maybe someday.” They weren’t just clutter. They were artifacts of a brain in survival mode. ADHD untamed. CPTSD flaring. I didn’t know how to let go, so I kept. Kept and kept and kept. Until it filled up shelves and closets and rooms. Nineteen boxes. Nineteen.

It took everything in me to sort through them. To part ways with those fragments. Each item was a decision. Each decision, a micro-confrontation with who I was when I thought I needed that thing. Most of it turned out to be useless, sure. But none of it was meaningless.

Now? Now I keep just one box. Just one. And I’ve actually used things from it. I don’t collect doom anymore. Not like I used to.

And books—books have slowed. I haven’t bought a new one in months. I borrow them now, listen to them mostly. The physical act of collecting books, it turns out, was more impulse than intention. More habit than hunger. I loved the idea of them. Still do. I still love the feel of a new book in my hands, the smell of ink and glue and promise. But I don’t need to possess them anymore. I’ve learned to let stories pass through me rather than hoard them on shelves.

What I collect now… is something stranger. Softer. Smaller.

Rocks.

Specifically, heart-shaped ones.

My kids and I—we’ve made a quiet ritual of this. Whether by a river or in a gas station parking lot, our eyes are always on the ground, scanning for that little curve, that slight indentation. A rock that resembles a heart, however imperfectly. We keep them in a small wooden box at home. No display case. Just a box. When it fills, we empty it a little, make room for the new—except for the heart-shaped ones. Those stay. We have nearly seventy now. Each one, a moment.

I can tell you where we found most of them. What the weather was like. Who laughed first that day. Which pocket it got slipped into.

We don’t collect these rocks because they’re valuable. Or rare. We collect them because they anchor us to something real. Time spent together. Silence shared without pressure. A different kind of belonging. The kind that comes without needing to explain yourself. Just… being. Being in the same place, at the same time, looking down—and suddenly finding a heart in the dust.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been collecting all along. Not objects. But anchors. To memory. To people. To versions of myself I’ve had to lose and learn how to miss.

Do I collect things?

Yeah. I do.

But it’s less about what I’m holding on to.

And more about what I’ve finally learned to let in.

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