Why Temporary Things Feel Permanent

An essay on memory, attachment, and the things we cannot leave behind.

My room is looking like somebody has pressed pause halfway through a life. Like it is so messy and clean at the same time; open boxes were leaning against the wall, my clothes are piled up unevenly, books in my bookshelf have bookmarks coming out of the pages, charging cables that belonged to phones, electric appliances I don’t even own anymore, and a coffee mug sitting on my messy desk with coffee that had already gone cold hours ago. And I also have posters of old movies, TV shows, and music bands that I don’t even watch or listen to now. And still I kept telling myself I was cleaning, though all I had really done was move memories from one corner of my room to another. Whenever I try to pick up any object to throw, I feel like the object is talking to me and asking the same question: “Are you done with me?” IDK but ughhh IDK!!!! It is making me feel strange how a room could become heavier while I was trying to empty it. I sat on the floor for a while and realised that I wasn’t sorting through things; I was sorting through pieces of myself.

I kept thinking about balloons after birthday parties. They float around the room looking alive even after everyone has gone home. The cake is gone, the music is over, the decorations are half torn down, and there they are, still hanging near the ceiling as if the celebration never ended. They fool the room into believing the moment is still breathing. Then a few days pass, the air escapes, and they fall into a corner. Objects in my room felt exactly like those balloons. They held the shape of old moments after those moments had already left. I wasn’t keeping the objects. I was keeping the air trapped inside them.

That thought stayed with me while I picked up an old train ticket from inside one of my notebooks. The date had almost disappeared. I couldn’t remember where the train was going. I couldn’t remember what I wore that day either. What I remembered was laughing until my stomach hurt with someone who isn’t part of my life anymore. Somehow the ticket had become the final witness. Losing it felt bigger than throwing away a small piece of paper. It felt like asking a memory to defend itself without any evidence.

I think that’s what makes temporary things feel permanent. They become stand-ins for moments our minds refuse to trust themselves with. Memory has a habit of changing every time it gets replayed. Conversations become cleaner or curated than they really were. Faces become brighter. Good days become perfect. Bad days lose their sharp edges. Objects interrupt that process. They sit there without saying anything, quietly reminding me that something happened. They don’t tell the whole story. They simply refuse to let the story disappear completely.

When I opened submissions for this topic, I got one submission from Christina. Christina wrote about temporary things with the same honesty I had been wrestling with while sitting in my room. Reading her piece felt like hearing another person describe a place I thought only I had visited. Instead of repeating her thoughts in my own words, I want her voice to speak for itself.

CHRISTINA’S ESSAY:

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“Emotional attachment” and “temporary things” should never belong in the same sentence. One suggests permanence, roots, psychological gravity. The other practically announces its own expiration date. And yet, human beings are masters at welding sentiment onto objects that were never designed to survive, either physically or emotionally.

We become irrational archivists of nonsense.

A cracked coffee mug from a failed relationship. A cinema ticket fading into illegibility inside a drawer no one opens. A hotel keycard from a city we barely remember. An old T-shirt that somehow still survives every wardrobe purge like a manipulative ex refusing to move out. None of these objects possess objective value. And yet we defend them with alarming emotional conviction.

The absurdity is fascinating.

After all, the attachment is rarely about the object itself. It is about the invisible residue surrounding it. A smell trapped in fabric. The temperature of a particular afternoon. The texture of a moment that no longer exists except through association. Objects become emotional smugglers. They carry fragments of people, versions of ourselves, entire atmospheres. We assign memory to matter, as if molecules are capable of loyalty.

The philosopher Heraclitus famously wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” Everything changes. Constantly. Cells die. Faces alter. Relationships mutate. Entire identities expire, while we pretend continuity exists. Perhaps this is precisely why we cling so desperately to temporary things: because they appear to freeze time, even if only cosmetically. An old lighter from university feels less like plastic and more like forensic evidence that a former self once existed.

Of course, there is also vanity involved. We like to believe our emotions are profound enough to transform ordinary objects into sacred artifacts. A stranger sees clutter; we see mythology. Somewhere between sentimentality and narcissism lies the reason people move apartments carrying boxes filled with emotional fossils they have not touched in fifteen years.

And maybe our inability to let go has less to do with love and more to do with our hostility toward loss itself. Modern culture treats loss like failure. We romanticize “moving on,” “decluttering,” “detachment,” as though emotional minimalism were a sign of psychological evolution. But privately, many people experience throwing away an old receipt with the emotional intensity of deleting evidence from their own existence.

Because loss implies something terrifying: if objects can disappear so easily, perhaps we can too.

The Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius warned himself constantly about impermanence: “You could leave life right now.” Cheerful man. But he understood something uncomfortable. Humans do not merely fear death; we fear evaporation. The idea that experiences, relationships, identities, even bodies eventually dissolve into irrelevance feels almost offensive to the ego. So we negotiate with permanence through objects. We preserve fragments. Souvenirs become emotional life rafts floating against the terrifying current of the ephemeral.

But there may be another layer beneath all this. Perhaps we are not attached to the object, nor even the memory, but to the hope that everything carries hidden meaning. Humans are pattern-hungry creatures. We cannot tolerate randomness for too long. We want signs, symbolism, narrative architecture. We desperately want life to mean something, even if that meaning has to be projected onto an expired perfume bottle or a dying bouquet hanging upside down in a kitchen corner like a gothic science experiment.

Which raises an unsettling possibility.

Maybe the object was never temporary at all.

Maybe we are.

Footnote:

This is not an accidental footnote. It was written 5a.m., while decluttering my personal stuff scattered across the floor like an inventory of former selves and a few hours before the movers arrived. So, just before the final collapse of my ‘home” into boxes and labels, I sat there, with a Greek coffee gone cold. In that suspended stillness, I found myself negotiating not just with objects, but with memory itself; deciding what deserves to be carried forward and what must be surrendered to make space for what I do not yet know.

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After I finished reading Christina’s essay, I looked around my room again and noticed something I had completely missed earlier. Every single object I had struggled to throw away belonged to a different version of me. The hoodie from college belonged to someone who believed every friendship would last forever. The movie ticket belonged to someone who measured happiness through weekends. The notebook filled with terrible ideas belonged to someone convinced success had to happen before twenty-five. None of those people exists in my life anymore, yet their belongings were still asking for shelf space.

I think people assume attachment always points toward the past. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Sometimes attachment points toward an identity I don’t want to admit I’ve outgrown. Holding onto an object feels easier than admitting I’ve changed. That feels comforting in a world where everything expects constant updates, fresh starts, and polished introductions.

There is also something funny about how selective memory can be. I have thrown away expensive things without a second thought, yet I have protected a folded receipt from a convenience store like it belonged in a museum. I have deleted thousands of photos while refusing to part with a keychain whose paint has almost disappeared. Logic never stood a chance once emotion entered the room. Feelings have their own accounting system, and nothing inside it follows common sense.

People love saying that moving on means letting go. I don’t think moving on has ever been that clean. Life keeps adding chapters without collecting the old ones first. They stay stacked somewhere inside us, even when we stop reading them. The objects are simply the physical copies sitting on the shelf. They remind me that time keeps moving even when my mind decides to revisit an older page for a while.

The funny thing is that every object I almost cried over will eventually disappear too. Fabric tears. Paper fades. Plastic becomes brittle. Photographs lose their color. Even the boxes surrounding me will end up in somebody else’s recycling bin one day. Everything has an ending written into it from the very beginning. I know that. I have always known that. My heart just signs the agreement much later than my mind does.

By the time I taped the final box shut, the room looked unfamiliar. There were blank spaces where shelves used to be crowded. The walls echoed differently. My desk looked larger than I remembered. I carried fewer things than I expected, though I carried more memories than I could ever fit inside those boxes. That felt like a fair trade.

Temporary things feel permanent since they spend years convincing us they are protecting our memories. The truth is far more comforting. The objects were never carrying those moments on my behalf. I was. They simply gave my hands something to hold while my heart figured out how to carry the rest.

About the Co-Author:

Christina is a writer drawn to the quiet intersections of memory, identity, and impermanence. Through reflective essays that blend philosophy with personal observation, she explores the emotional lives we build around ordinary moments and the invisible meanings we attach to the things we carry. Her work asks how memory shapes who we become, why we struggle to let go, and what it means to find beauty in life’s fleeting nature. With a voice that is both introspective and intellectually curious, Christina invites readers to see the familiar through a more thoughtful lens.

Co-Author Substack ID: Christina Tsermentseli

Co-Author IG handle: @sirens.on.the.rocks