YOUR COLLECTION

It’s natural, for people to collect.

A collection gives you a purpose in life. It gives meaning to the mundane, and it preoccupies the mind so that one doesn’t drive oneself crazy. It gives order to chaos. Collecting gives a sense of belonging in a world where loneliness is all too common. But we are all the same, aren’t we?

We all collect something.

As a child I collected playing cards. I was fascinated by the close up magic tricks I would see at community gatherings, and I made my father buy me a cheap set of cards the first day I ever saw one. Soon after I saw a magician use some that were gold lined, and then I saw some more with intricate designs on the back. It was the start of a 5 year long crusade to collect as many different styles of playing card as I could, and it was apt, because I had fallen in love with such a simple component of magic, and yet I was the one under the spell.

I had become bound to my collection.

Then, when I was a teenager, we had a small house fire. Nobody got hurt, thankfully, but every single pack in my collection was damaged. I was traumatised. I could not believe that this collection that had filled my life for so long was gone. I considered how much money I would have to find to start over. I considered the limited edition runs I had that would no longer be available to buy. And when I had spent a few days obsessing as much over replacing the collection as I had over the collection itself, it suddenly hit me.

I didn’t actually care about the cards. It was the collecting I had loved.

You see, a collection is not the sum of it’s physical parts. A collection is an arrangement of memories. Each pack of cards I collected reminded me of somewhere I once was, or something I’d once seen. They were the triggers to the times I loved in my life. But I realised quite quickly that I didn’t need those cards to trigger those memories. So I stopped collecting.

Yet Sigil keeps collecting. He has not yet come to the conclusion I was able to make when I was a teenager. His endless halls of worthless trinkets still fill his life, still keep him preoccupied. Maybe he isn’t ready to face the memories alone yet. Maybe he genuinely believes these physical items mean something in all of this. You’d think a man who can control time and reality would figure it out, but here we stand.

Sigil still remains under the spell I once found myself under. There are only two ways to break the spell. The first is to permanently lose the possessions you collect. That won’t do. The second is to lose the memories you attach to them. So that’s the favour I’ll grant Sigil this week. I’ll beat him so hard the memories leak right out of his ears, and then he won’t need to collect anything anymore.

Vote Whitlock.