Tag: childhood

Do You Have Any Collections?

I used to collect stamps once.
Tiny rectangles carrying countries I had never seen,
languages I could not read,
and kings, birds, flowers, mountains, and histories I knew nothing about.

Then came coins.

Old coins. Shiny coins. Foreign coins.
Coins with holes in them.
Coins that looked more valuable than my entire personality in school.

Back then, finding one unusual coin felt like discovering treasure.
Now I lose ₹10 coins inside sofa cushions and emotionally move on.

Somewhere between growing up and paying bills,
my collections disappeared quietly.

The albums are gone.
The little plastic folders vanished.
Even the excitement of asking relatives,
“Do you have any old stamps?”
has retired respectfully.

But maybe we never really stop collecting things.

We simply change what we collect.

Now I collect screenshots I’ll never revisit.
Saved reels I’ll never watch again.
Travel tickets folded inside books.
Receipts from cafés because “the paper looked aesthetic.”
Unread books.
Half-finished notebooks.
Memories from random rainy evenings.
And conversations that should have meant less… but didn’t.

Adulthood is honestly just becoming a curator of emotionally unnecessary things.

And somehow, the weirdest collections are always invisible.

We collect people’s words.
Certain songs.
Specific smells from childhood.
Tiny heartbreaks.
Almost-confessions.
Moments where we laughed too hard in the middle of ordinary days.

No shelf displays them.
Yet they occupy the most space.

And maybe that’s why old collections feel so precious today —
because they remind us of a version of ourselves
who found magic in tiny things.

A coin.
A stamp.
A sticker.
A postcard.

Little objects… carrying entire worlds.

✦ Poem ✦

I once kept stamps in careful rows,
like little doors to distant roads;
and coins inside a velvet tin,
as if they held the world within.

Now drawers are filled with stranger things —
old movie tickets, broken rings,
receipts from cafés, faded notes,
and passwords nobody even wrote.

We grow, and so our collections do;
less about objects, more about who.
A laugh, a face, a fleeting day,
the kind that never fully fades away.

And isn’t it funny, strange, yet true —
the older we get, the more we pursue
small little moments we cannot hold…
while missing the treasures we once called gold. ✨

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With love,

—Rajeshwari 🧿💕

© Nihshabd by Rajeshwari. All Rights Reserved