On my kitchen shelf there is a glass jar with no label. It holds three seashells, a folded bus ticket from 2019, and a doodle on a napkin — a crooked shophouse with a awning that looks like a tongue sticking out. None of these items are valuable. Together they annoy anyone who opens my cupboards looking for a proper container. Alone they are the fragments of a story I tell myself when the week runs long.
The shells came from East Coast on a day I hadn't planned to go to the beach. Rain threatened, the sand was nearly empty, and I walked the breakwater because a friend had cancelled and I didn't want to go home yet. I picked up shells without criteria — not the prettiest, just the ones that fit in my palm. They sat in my pocket until laundry day, then migrated to the counter, then to the jar because the counter looked like a museum of unfinished intentions.
I keep the jar because some stories aren't ready to be sentences yet. They're still objects waiting for their turn.
The bus ticket survived because it was in the same coat pocket as the shells, creased into a triangle, date-stamped on a route I no longer take. I don't remember where I was going. I remember the ride — air-con too cold, an auntie offering a sweet without explanation, the city sliding past the window like a slow film. The ticket is proof that an ordinary journey happened, which sounds absurd until you realise how much of life leaves no receipt.
The doodle came later, on a Sunday when I was waiting for teh to cool and doodling on the only paper available. I'm not an artist. The shophouse looks nothing like any real building in Joo Chiat. But the awning makes me laugh, and laughter is a legitimate archive category in this flat.
Last month a visitor asked why I don't clear the jar. I said it holds a story I'm still writing. She looked sceptical, which is fair — from outside it's clutter. From inside it's a serial in pause, a making project without an outcome. Not everything has to become a product. Some things remain process because the process is the point.
I've thought about adding a label — "East Coast / 966 / Sunday" — and decided against it. Labels turn mystery into inventory. The jar works because I know the tale and you don't, and when I open it I remember pieces in a different order each time. That's closer to how memory actually behaves than any polished essay.
Maybe one day the jar empties into a longer story. Maybe the shells go back to the sea. For now they sit at eye level when I reach for tea, a small creative anchor in a kitchen otherwise organised for function. A reminder that not all making is for display. Some is for the shelf you see every day.
Story kept.