You know how to spot a Kinda Thing?

A long time ago, someone asked me a strange question.

It was my last year of high school. I was drunk out of my mind and crashing at a friend’s place. We were coming down from an after party and half of us didn’t want to go home. Two guys were sleeping on the floor. One was nodding on and off in a lazy boy in the corner, still gripping a forty. I was on the couch with a curly-haired girl, talking about nothing.

“You know how to spot a Kinda Thing?”

“What kinda thing?”

“No, no,” she said, lazily shaking her head. “Not a kind-of-thing. A Kinda Thing.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

She poked me in the chest and put her head on my shoulder, falling half-asleep as she explained.

“It’s a game. It teaches you to think about stuff.”

“Alright, what is it?”

“You sure you wanna know?”

“I mean, now I have to.”

 

I was barely paying attention. My hands smelled like cheese snacks and rubber. We’d been playing ping-pong, and the rackets were kinda cheap.

“Think of a place you spend a lot of time in. Like… several times a week. But not all the time. Not like your bedroom.”

“I don’t spend all my time in my bedroom.”

“Come on, you got a place in mind?”

I thought about this alleyway between my family home and my neighbor. It was this fenced-off alley, not big enough to drive a car through. I went there every day on my way to class.

“Aight,” I nodded. “I got one.”

“Now think of something in that place. Something you know, but don’t own. Something you’ve seen, but… got no pictures of.”

“Gimme a sec.”

I thought about this one particular thing. It was a little teddy bear keychain that someone had put on one of the fence posts. Nothing big, just a plastic thing with a heart in the middle of the chest and an all-too neutral teddy bear smile. Just a fun little quirk on an otherwise depressing stretch of concrete.

“Alright, I got a thing.”

“You know what colors it is?” she asked.

I had an idea, but I wasn’t 100% certain. There was some red in there, I knew that much. A bit of yellow. But I couldn’t say exactly what was what. Maybe the nose was black?

“Kinda?” I said.

She looked up at me and poked me in the chest again.

“That’s a Kinda Thing,” she muttered. “They’re pretty cool.”

 

She sat up and stretched a little, kicking over an empty can. The guy with the forty had fully admitted defeat and curled up into a ball.

“They exist on the edge of things,” she explained. “It could be blue. It could be yellow. It could change into red. There’s no way to really know. It only exists in your memory.”

“But it’s red.”

“How can you know for sure? Like, for sure for sure?”

“I can check it.”

“What if it wasn’t red yesterday? Do you know, for sure, what it was yesterday?”

“I mean, things don’t change color.”

“Kinda Things do.”

“You’re making this sound like a ghost story.”

“Who says it isn’t?”

 

We got into this weird wine-fueled philosophy nonsense that lead us nowhere and ended up making out on the patio, staying up til dawn. As the sun rose and a car came to take her away, I decided to drag myself home.

As I wandered, I took the route through that alley. And like always, the teddy bear keychain hung on one of the posts. Except the thing wasn’t red, or yellow. It was blue, like my mother’s novelty sunflowers. There were a couple of red spots along the paws, but the main thing was all blue. I’d been certain it was supposed to be all red, but maybe I’d just focused on the details. I picked it up, put it in my pocket, and instantly forgot about it.

I wouldn’t see that keychain for a long time, and I wouldn’t think much of it. But I guess that’s the nature of Kinda Things.

 

I saw that keychain a couple of times over the next few years. When I moved into my college dorm, I had it resting on my windowsill. I think my mom put it there. At some point I knocked it over and it rolled under a nightstand, where I didn’t find it until years later when I graduated. From there, it ended up in a box of knick-knacks, which ended up on a shelf in my apartment. It wasn’t an exciting journey, but it was my journey. You sort of forget how long things stick around until you’re old enough to look back.

I got my bachelor’s degree, my master’s degree, and got working on a doctorate. As part of my doctorate, I had to teach a class. My expertise circled around information science, with a slight leaning towards digital architecture and preservation, but I wanted to give my classes something to make them really stick. That was the first time in years that I thought of Kinda Things. Problem was, once I went looking for that teddy bear keychain to bring to class, I couldn’t find it.

When I held my first class, I told them all about the Kinda Things. I asked my students to consider what their own Kinda Things would be. It was all framed in the context of how important it is to preserve factual information in a way that makes it contextually aware, but for all the first-year students, it turned into a thing to share at parties. And the circle of drunk philosophers continued for another generation.

It was fun though, they all had something. A cracked coffee cup. An old bike wheel abandoned near the football field. A baseball cap on the top shelf that they couldn’t reach. All little things that didn’t matter but were important enough to be made and forgotten about. And now I had a whole class thinking about them.

Every class I taught heard that story. I skipped the part where I made out and smelled of fritos, they didn’t need the details. Not everyone knew my name, but they all remembered me asking that first question, on the first day of class.

You know how to spot a Kinda Thing?

 

By the time I turned 27, I finished my doctorate. I had a paid position, but I was looking for something more permanent. You don’t go chasing tenure right away, and I wanted to do more experimental work. Maybe field work, even. I had applied for a couple positions at colleges out of state. Not ivy league, but up there in the charts. I figured this was as good a time as any to stretch my wings after spending all of my life in one state and city.

One of my proposals got picked up, and my time as a teacher of that one class was swiftly coming to an end. One more semester, and that would be it. It was bittersweet; I’d gotten to know my colleagues pretty well. They were a fun bunch of nerds, having board game nights in the lounge. They all had this thing where they used cleaned-out vodka bottles as water bottles, just so students could take funny pictures and go “this is my professor LOL”.

I was sad to see it come to an end, but it was time to move on to newer things. New can’t always be bad, and my colleagues had planned one hell of a going away party.

 

It was the last day of class, a Friday. They were holding a bit of an event for my last class, and all my colleagues were there. Some held speeches, and the students were invited to share some anecdotes as well. There were a lot of nice words. I won’t lie, I got a bit teary-eyed. Once things come to an end, everything gets put into the perspective of how much you’re going to miss it. Every stupid little detail.

As a final hoorah, they revealed a gift to me. Something for me to bring to my next office. I could tell it was a box of some kind, covered in a big white cloth. They pulled it off with a magician’s flair. We all applauded.

There was a box, that much was right. A big one. At first it looked like a junk drawer. A rock with googly eyes, an old horseshoe, a tasteless bronze leprechaun, things like that. But once I saw the text printed on the side, it all made sense.

‘Kinda Things’.

“We decided to get them for you,” a colleague said, leaning on my arm. “We know how much you love them, so we all went out and got our Kinda Things. We figured you’d enjoy them.”

I’ve never been so proud to get a box of junk.

 

The next few weeks were a blur. Moving trucks, cleaning, leases, putting those plastic buttons on the legs of new furniture so they don’t scrape the floor. Putting up shelves, straightening photos and paintings, washing the cloth for the kitchen table. Making a space into a home, one tacky bachelor item at a time. All the while I had a box resting on top of my closet, still proudly labeled ‘Kinda Things’.

I got an apartment with three rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. I hadn’t planned on living that large, but it was too cheap for me to pass up. I made one room into my bedroom and the other my living room, but I wasn’t so sure about the third one. I decided I’d make it into a guest room, somewhere down the line. For now, it was storage space. Somewhere for me to put boxes of memories that didn’t quite matter. Not just the Kinda Things, but the baseball cards, the participation trophies, and the signed band shirts. It was all in there. I think most people have a space like that, in one way or another.

It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I was settling into a new job, with new people, in a new town. I was learning what places made the best tofu dishes, there was no time to reminisce. I had to look forward. If you don’t, things in the rear-view look bigger than they really are.

 

On my first day of class, I brought the box of Kinda Things. I barely looked at it; I was too busy trying to keep the notes in my head organized. I couldn’t half-ass my first day on the job, I had to make an impression. Not just for my students, but there’d be a couple of new colleagues in the crowd. That’s why I brought the box. Crowds love props.

I shook hands with those who attended, introduced myself, and got a moderate crowd of about 40 people for my first day. Not just a class, but a couple of extras. I asked them all to sit up front as I unveiled the box. I had it turned outward towards the students. I barely saw the thing myself.

“No photos,” I emphasized, shushing them with a finger like I was telling a secret. “No pictures, and no ownership. You can keep them, but they’re never really yours.”

That got a couple of chuckles. I had a presentation ready and had them name a couple of Kinda Things in their own lives as I slowly pivoted into a metaphor related to my field of study. It was pretty clean, I’d used that particular setup a couple of times before.

And yet, there was something about that one class that didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t just being nervous about a new job, it was something about the crowd. Every time I looked back, my eyes got stuck on something. Like how you react to sudden movement, but with nothing changing.

Something was putting me on edge, and I couldn’t point my finger at what it was.

 

Coming back home after a long day, I put down my box of Kinda Things in the hallway and got myself a cold beer. I wasn’t going anywhere, and I’d spent all my social energy in one go. There’d been muffins in the lounge, and everyone wanted to talk to me about my various articles. And, of course, the Kinda Things. Everyone always wants to tell me about their Kinda Thing.

I walked into my budding guest room, with its mint green walls. I put down my beer and tossed the box back up on the closet. As I did, something tumbled out.

My teddy bear keychain.

It landed on the floor with a little rattle. I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded. It couldn’t have been in the box, I would’ve seen it. Or maybe I put it there during the move, and forgot about it. Strange. I hadn’t seen it for a long time.

 

I picked it up and rolled it between my fingers, looking at the colors and shapes. It wasn’t like how I remembered it. It wasn’t all blue, like I thought it was. It was mostly gray with details of blue and red. The eyes looked like lemons. The heart in the center of its chest was a little smaller than I remembered. I decided to take the box back down to check if there was anything else I’d accidentally put in there that I’d forgotten about.

I sat down on the floor, took another sip of beer, and opened the box. For a moment, my mind short-circuited. I had never seen any those things before. There was an old-timey alarm clock with a broken spring, what looked like a watermelon paperweight, and a handheld dinner bell without the ringer thing in the middle. I hadn’t seen any of those items before, and I was more than certain that I’d gone through that box at least once or twice.

But then, why couldn’t I remember those things, and who gave them to me?

I sat there, trying to think of the names of the students who’d been there. I remembered them fairly well, but I couldn’t point to who gave me what. That, and little details about them had faded. Was it Josh or Joshua? Did one of them have an NHL or NBA cap? I could sort of remember the outline, but not the absolute details.

 

It gave me a moment to pause. I considered that there might be such a thing as Kinda People. Those people you spend a little time with every now and then, but never really get to know. Peripheral people. Pseudo-people. If that’s the case, who’s to say I wasn’t someone’s Kinda People? I mean, I had to be. Right?

I shook the thought out of my mind, finished my beer, and got up off the floor. I headed for the door, closed my hand around the handle, and pulled. Nothing happened. Had it always been opened outward? Of course it had. It was just a new apartment, and I was getting accustomed to it.

And yet…

 

I’m not one for being paranoid. Through all my years of talking about Kinda Things, I always considered them a fun thought experiment. Some talked about them like demons, or ghost stories. Like they were supposed to bring something horrible. I never saw it like that, they were just this idea to consider about the nature of permanence. They weren’t malicious things.

And yet, I started to get this uncomfortable sensation in my stomach whenever I passed by my guest room. It wasn’t a conscious thought, just this sense of unease. Like there would be something new for me to misremember if I entered that room, with that box, and didn’t pay attention. I tried to remember exactly what I’d seen in that box, and what color they were, but without going in there to check there was no way to know for sure. That just made it worse.

I finally decided that I was going to indulge my superstition, just to demystify the whole thing. One weekend I got my phone, a notepad, and decided I was going to write down and photograph everything in that box. After that, I would never have to think about it again. It could even be a fun thing to try against my students. Maybe I could ask them to remember as many things as possible from the box and cross-check it at the end of the semester to see how many points they score.

 

I’d brought a small coffee table and a chair from the kitchen. I pulled the curtains open, letting in some moonlight. It was late May and the nights were growing shorter. Perfect for someone who’d run out of steam grading assignments all Friday.

I took down the box from the top of the closet and noticed the teddy bear keychain. Nothing strange about it, other than it being in the box. I must’ve put it there when I put the box back up. No point in getting antsy at the first item. Then again, the eyes looked more mango than lemon. How could I have been so certain about the lemon color? Maybe the moonlight made it look different.

I brought out one item after another, only stopping briefly to think about who gave it to me. I remembered quite a lot of them. I could pretty clearly tell which of them were from my colleagues, and which weren’t. A couple of items were probably just random debris that one picked up just to be in on the joke. However, I suspected that quite a few things were probably authentic Kindas.

I went through the items one by one, taking pictures and writing their features down in a notebook. It was a strange feeling, sitting alone with so many uncertainties. About three dozen thought experiments, all neatly lined up and catalogued.

 

The final item I wrote down was a little ceramic frog in a tux, smoking a cigar. There were some folks outside making a ruckus, so I got up to close the guest room door. I paused for a moment to consider which way the door went. It opened outward.

Sitting back down, I took a closer look at the ceramic frog knick-knack. It wasn’t smoking a cigar; it was more like a cigarette. A long, lean one. It wasn’t a big detail, but it was enough to make me doubt myself. What if I had catalogued something else wrong? Just a teeny, tiny bit wrong? That would put the whole thing into question. I had to be certain.

I went back along the line of items, double-checking. I made a few corrections. The alarm clock was stuck on 1:30, not 1:25. The broken spring went around six times, with a twirl at the end; not seven times, with a straight end. And finally, I was back to my teddy bear keychain. I wrote down the details as I remembered them. Scratching my head, I got up. I needed a break anyway.

I went back to the guest room door and tugged on the handle. It was supposed to open outward, but it didn’t. I pulled it inward instead.

That didn’t work either.

 

I took a step back, feeling a stone sink into my chest. I could hear my own breathing as the room felt smaller. I put my hand on the handle again and took a deep breath. I’d opened this door before. I knew it would open again. I turned the handle and pushed – it swung outward. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then again, why was I relieved? What was I expecting? There was no world in which that door wouldn’t open, so what was the big deal?

I decided I wouldn’t let myself be tricked by uncertainty. I closed the door and opened it again. Then I did it again. Then I did it a third time, but with a little celebratory twirl. As I came around, I noticed something on the coffee table.

The frog was definitely smoking a cigar.

I stopped mid-twirl and looked a little closer. That wasn’t right. I’d written cigar, crossed it out, written cigarette, and now it was certainly a cigar again.

 

I picked it up and held it up to the light. Definitely a cigar, no question about it. In every conceivable angle. I tried to get a reference point, like how the cigar was as thick as its froggy fingers. A cigarette wouldn’t be like that. That was something I could rely on. A measurement, not a casual observation. I put it down and stepped back, looking at the table as a whole.

Without perceiving every single item individually, there were things I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but I knew something looked different. Or maybe not even looked. It felt different.

For the first time, I considered that maybe Kinda Things weren’t just a thought experiment. Maybe there really was something to them. Maybe the items at the fringe of our lives do possess some quality that we don’t perceive until we sit down and look. And if that was the case, what might happen if you put 36 of them in a single room and close the door?

Hold on, I didn’t close the door. It was open last time I checked.

 

I paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. I was spiraling for no reason, working myself up over nothing. Like staring at a still picture, thinking there’s a ghost in it. These weren’t ghosts or creepy crawlies, they were just little things left by the roadside. Figuratively, and literally. I picked up the first thing I spotted and held it up; a little glass snail. It’d lost one of its eye stalks. I looked to my reference sheet to confirm which eye it was, only to realize the snail wasn’t on the sheet to begin with. Had I missed it?

At that point, I stopped. I flicked the snail across the room, grasped my head, and said ‘No’ out loud. I needed to hear the word to ground myself. I was making things up. I had to be. I decided to call it a night, leaving it all on the table for now. I shook my head and turned to the window, grasping for the curtains as I checked my phone. It was getting close to 11pm.

There were no curtains.

Looking up, I realized I was standing at the wrong end of the room. The window was to the right, and there were no curtains. I had been so certain just a second ago, but my hand just tapped against the eggshell wallpaper. I was getting confused.

 

Turning back around, I noticed two things. One, that the door was slightly more to the right than I thought it would be, and that the coffee table was up against the leftmost wall. It’s like I’d turned the wrong way. My eyes briefly crossed over, and I saw double. I shook my head again, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

I tried telling myself it was conditioning. I had been thinking about uncertainty all day, and I was tricking myself into a pattern of thought. I headed for the door, turned the handle, and pushed outward.

Again, nothing.

This didn’t make sense. I knew it opened outward, and I refused to believe otherwise. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, and I had to accept that this was not normal.

 

Over the next few minutes, it felt like everything changed every time I looked away. The window felt smaller. The door had the handle on the wrong side. The coffee table was up against the leftmost wall, then the right. The wallpaper was eggshell, then got a slight hint of maroon. The floor was imitation wood, then a textureless brown plastic. I pulled on the door a couple of times, but it didn’t open either way.

I turned to open the window, but it was gone. I could feel a cold sweat coming on. I wasn’t imagining this. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. I knew what was out there, and I knew I’d looked out that window dozens of times.

I backed away and put my hand on the light switch. I flicked it off, and on again.

A couple of things changed. A few items seemed to have moved. One of the closet doors was open. I flicked the light again, faster this time.

The table was slightly angled. The window was still gone. I reached for the light switch again, but it was higher up than before. I flicked it off, and back on again.

But the light come back on.

 

I fumbled around in the dark. I could feel myself stepping on things that weren’t supposed to be there. I stubbed my toe against the coffee table in the middle of the room. I fumbled with my hands along all four walls of the room, but I couldn’t find the door.  I couldn’t find the closet. After a while, I couldn’t even find the coffee table.

I tried lying down flat and spreading out my arms, hoping to touch pretty much whatever. After a couple of tries, I couldn’t even find my way back to the wall. It was just me and this impressionless void.

It didn’t make sense to me. I knew exactly where things were supposed to be. I knew what I was supposed to be looking at. But that didn’t matter.

 

I brought out my phone and turned on the flashlight. I didn’t have a lot of battery, but it would have to do. I could see my own hands, but nothing else. It was just this intense darkness where not even moonlight could reach. I got down on my knees and touched the floor. This textureless, neutral floor. Not cold, or warm, just a solid matte black. The light didn’t reflect off of it.

I walked around. At times I would bump into a wall, but when I turned, the way forward was wide open. I tried jumping a couple of times, but my feet didn’t make a sound. I tried calling out, but there was no echo. Not even reverb. It was such a strange sensation that it hurt to comprehend.

I ran, and crawled, and jumped and rolled. There was just nothing. Nothing.

And when I screamed, I couldn’t hear it outside my head.

 

It felt like I was inside a cube. Not a room, but like a big, dark, cube. It’s as if the Kinda Things had made everything so uncertain that I slipped between the cracks, ending up in someplace in-between. If I tripped or fell, I could feel myself rolling off the floor and landing on what was previously a wall, making me think every angle was made to be uncertain. Designed to change.

After a while, I just started walking forward. I walked and walked and walked, but never hit a wall. Ten minutes, still no wall. My heart was pounding out of my chest, and I could taste salt on my tongue. Without anything outside yourself, you start to notice details you would otherwise ignore. Like how you breathe, or how your heart sounds as it beats. You can hear the tendons stretch in your legs with every step and you start to question ‘why’.

I tried to fixate on things I knew for certain. My name. My parents. The name of my childhood friends. But even in that circle of grounding, there was doubt. What color were my mother’s eyes really?

And that damn teddy bear keychain. What did it really look like?

 

That seemed to shift something. There was a flash, like a light post going past a speeding car. That was something. Reaction. Maybe the Kinda Things, if they got me lost, could also help me find a way back.

I thought about that teddy bear keychain. I tried to imagine myself on that first drunken morning, picking it up from the fence behind my family home. I remembered turning it over in my hands, looking at the colors and the patterns. But in that thought, there was nothing there. Just this swirling pattern of black and white, like the static between TV channels. Thinking about it tickled my hands, making my brain feel like it needed to discard the memory like an unpleasant sneeze.

I brought the memory back farther. I thought about that night on the couch, with that curly-haired girl. That night when I first heard about the Kinda Things. Who had she been? We’d talked all night. We’d made out, but I couldn’t remember her name. Did I ever see her again?

And there were a couple of things that didn’t add up. Had she known anyone at the party? Why was she the only girl there? Why didn’t we exchange numbers?

My thoughts spiraled as I started to question every step along my path. You are what you do, and if all you’ve done can be called into question, you start to feel like nothing.

 

I fell to my knees. It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. It was like floating in a world that forgot to pull you down. I would sometimes find myself inches above the ground, having to stretch my toes down just to feel something solid. After a while, I lost that too.

But I kept my mind on that teddy bear. I pushed past the fractal images I’d built in my mind. The red, the blue, the gray, the black. The lime and mango eyes. If you looked past all of it, there were certainties that never changed. It had two eyes. Two legs. Two arms, and a heart on its chest. That was always there. That was certain.

I repeated it like a mantra. Two eyes. Two legs. Two arms, and a heart. Two eyes. Two legs. Two arms, and a heart.

Something was happening. The ground came back. There was a light. Were they distant lamps, pieces of wallpaper, or lonely stars?

 

It was a night sky. I recognized some of the constellations. I spun around, pointing out patterns I recognized. I spun on my heel, excited to feel something solid beneath me.

Two eyes. Two legs. Two arms, and a heart.

As I came around the second spin, my entire field of view was absorbed. Something astronomically large. Impossibly large. A planet-sized eye, so unfathomable that it couldn’t be considered a thing, or a place. It just was.

An eye. The word rattled in my mind like a panicked bird in a cage, screaming at me, over and over. An eye. It was an eye. It repeated to the point where it turned from thing, to word, to noise. An eye. An eye. A Nai. A Nai. A Nai.

 

I shut my eyes and imagined the teddy bear keyring in my hands. I imagined the texture. I decided I would have to commit to a truth that I knew to be true. I had to force myself to be certain. I decided it was blue, with red details. That’s how I remembered it from that first night, and that’s what it had to be. Blue, with red details, and lemon eyes.

Looking up, I could see dozens of coffee tables in random patterns. All covered in teddy bear keychains of various shapes and patterns and colors. All the while, something so large that the universe itself looked like the dark of its eye bore down on me from every angle.

It didn’t need to say anything, I knew what had to be done. It wanted a choice. A certainty.

I had to show it the right Kinda Thing.

 

I have no idea how long I wandered that void, poking and prodding at those little keychains. One was darker blue with yellow lining. One was almost green. Every color combination imaginable, in every angle. The eye was patient. I had to be right.

I don’t know how long it took me, but I found myself holding something. I held it up, and looked at it. I knew it was the right one before I even noticed the colors. Maybe it became the right one just by believing it to be. That’s when it hit me; it didn’t matter. The original color was gone. There was no point in trying to restore an idea or thought that had passed from memory. I decided then and there that I would make this something it had never been. I rolled the keychain between my fingers and opened my eyes.

My hand was on the wall as the lights flicked back on.

I was covered in sweat. All the items from the Kinda Things box were still neatly lined up on the coffee table. Even the frog, with the cigarette. The mint green walls were there. The window. The curtains. The closet. And when my shaking hand touched the door handle, it effortlessly swung outward.

I cried with relief and crawled out, ending up in the hallway, clutching my teddy bear keychain.

 

The next day, that whole box of items went straight in the trash.

I stopped talking about the Kinda Things in my lectures. I made up this other thing about humpback whales and their patterns, but it wasn’t nearly as effective. People like talking about their own Kinda Things, and their own ideas relating to it. I still hear people talking about it on campus to this day, despite not mentioning it for about three years.

I have photographed and documented everything about that teddy bear a hundred times over, and it hasn’t changed since. I know it better than the color of my mother’s eyes. It’s my one anchor binding me to this place. I could never go without it.

 I still get uncertain sometimes. I think when you cluster so many Kinda Things, it triggers a kind of chain reaction. If you just have the one, I don’t think they do that much. You might just make the occasional mistake when trying to remember them. I think what I went through was a result of a cluster impression over a prolonged period of time.

 

I don’t ask people that strange question anymore. I don’t want to invite them into something they can’t prepare for. But if you were to look for a Kinda Thing on your own, do so in a way that destroys it. Photograph it. Keep it close. Remember it. If you keep it in the periphery, it may just drag you out there with it.

I’ve heard so many ideas on what they are, and why they function this way. Some say that it’s demons touching things that we forget to care for. Others say that it’s ghostly possession. I heard one student claiming they are lost souls, looking for solace in places they won’t be disturbed. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone will ever know for sure. It’s the nature of Kinda Things to never truly be known.

But as long as I have that one thing to keep me grounded, I’ll be fine. Maybe there’ll be the occasional Kinda Thing in my life going forward, but at least I will know not to collect them.

For now, I’ll keep my keychain close, and look to things I know for certain.

Two eyes. Two legs. Two arms, and a heart.

My all-red teddy bear keychain, with coal-black eyes.