On What You Keep

Men ask me, often, how they should keep it. They phrase it as a practical question, and I answer it practically, because the practical answer is short and there is a longer thing underneath it that they are not quite asking.

Sealed, cool, out of the light. That is all. Nothing I send needs more care than that and most of it needs less. The question was never really about storage.

What they are asking is whether they are allowed to keep it the way they want to keep it, which is usually somewhere absurd. A locked drawer at work. The inside pocket of a coat they never wear. One man kept his in the glovebox of a car he had not driven in a year, and told me so as though he were confessing to something.

I find these arrangements interesting rather than embarrassing, because every one of them is a solution to the same problem: where do you put a thing that is yours, that you cannot explain, inside a life that is otherwise fully explained. The hiding is not shame. The hiding is architecture.

A few ask whether I mind. Whether it is strange to know that something of mine sits in a stranger's coat pocket in a town I have never visited. It is not strange. It was made to be exactly there. It stopped being mine the moment it was paid for, which is the cleanest transfer there is and one of very few that nobody argues about afterwards.

The men who use it constantly are not the ones I think about. They have integrated it, it has become ordinary to them, and that is a perfectly good outcome and a slightly boring one. The ones I think about are the men who almost never take it out at all.

They will tell you, if you ask, that they are saving it. That is not what is happening. What is happening is that the object is doing its work simply by existing in the drawer, and taking it out would spend something. Knowing it is there is the entire function. The handling is almost incidental.

Which is why I do not sell a replacement to a man who has not used what he already has. It would be easy money and it would also be faintly dishonest, because the thing he is missing is not another object.

What eventually happens, in nearly every case, is that he stops needing to know exactly where it is. Not discarded. Simply no longer checked. And when a man tells me he has not thought about it in a month, and says it without any apology in his voice, that is usually the moment he asks me for something else entirely. The second thing he asks for is always more specific than the first.

So: keep it sealed, keep it wherever the architecture of your life allows, and do not mistake the object for the appetite. The object is a receipt.