Every household eventually develops a drawer dedicated entirely to hypothetical futures.
Not important futures.
Not emergency planning.
Not survival.
Just:
- unidentified adapters,
- spare batteries of uncertain vitality,
- birthday candles,
- adhesive hooks,
- instruction manuals nobody has willingly read,
- and small brightly coloured objects whose original purpose has been permanently lost to history.
In our home, this drawer belongs primarily to Joy.
Not officially.
No treaty was signed.
But spiritually, constitutionally, and operationally:
it is hers.
I should clarify that the cables are mine.
As is the archive of Apple packaging which I maintain with the seriousness of a mid-sized museum institution.
Joy’s drawer concerns itself with practical future scenarios.
Mine appears to operate from the belief that one day a person may urgently require:
- the original braided USB-C cable from a 2022 iPad,
- an iPhone box,
- or documentation proving that some long-retired electronic object once existed in its complete retail form.
Recent events suggest I may not be entirely wrong.
Only the other day I triumphantly recovered both an original iPod Shuffle and its corresponding 30-pin connector from entirely separate layers of domestic archaeology.
The satisfaction this produced was wildly disproportionate to the practical value of the discovery. I have not plugged it in to discover if it can be summoned back to life, though I very much doubt that it can.
This means we have accidentally developed a two-tier domestic preparedness system.
Joy prepares for:
- functional emergencies,
- household problems,
- and visitors unexpectedly needing batteries.
I prepare for:
- cable continuity,
- and a global shortage of emotionally significant cardboard.
I occasionally attempt intervention in her drawer regardless.
This generally begins with me opening it and asking questions like:
“Why do we own three packets of reusable wall hooks?”
or:
“What exactly is this tiny plastic key for?”
To which Joy responds with the calm confidence of a wartime quartermaster:
“I am not sure, but we might need it.”
This is difficult to argue against because:
- occasionally we do need it,
- and when that moment arrives,
- she retrieves the exact object within seconds like a stage magician producing evidence.
Meanwhile I stand nearby pretending I had not spent the previous eighteen months advocating for its removal.
The drawer therefore exists in a strange state between:
- clutter,
- preparedness,
- archaeology,
- and low-level prophecy.
Every item inside it represents an imagined future scenario.
A future guest needing a charger.
A future shelf requiring a specific hook.
A future emergency resolved specifically by:
one tiny brightly coloured object that appears medically or electrically significant.
There is something oddly hopeful about this.
The drawer quietly assumes:
- life will continue,
- problems will arise,
- visitors will appear,
- and somebody in this household intends to be ready for it.
Which may explain why, despite all my occasional threats to “sort it properly,” I secretly find the drawer deeply reassuring.
Civilisation, after all, is largely just organised collections of things we might need later.
And somewhere beneath the batteries, mystery objects, and expired warranty cards:
there remains the enduring optimism that future-us will be grateful we kept it.
So far, annoyingly, Joy continues to be correct.
— g