Totems of Presence

Memory, Objects, and the Mirage of Presence

I speak of accessories. Small objects, quiet witnesses of what we have loved, what we have lost. They are amulets of memory, anchors of presence. People drift away. They vanish. But the moments they leave — a laugh, a glance, a tear — remain, sealed in trinkets, locked in the weight of metal, glass, and wood. I cry in secret over these items, for they are the only remnants of certain lives, the only proof that time has passed.

Time — past, present, future — slips through my hands. The past is gone; the future waits, unseen. The present trembles, fragile, uncertain. I clutch my totems, small objects vibrating with memory, hoping to secure this now, to freeze it before it disappears. I watch life through layers of glass, questioning whether it is real, whether it moves forward or spins endlessly in a dream.

I remember Inception. Fischer in his labyrinth of dreams, reaching for a father he never held, receiving a toy that becomes a key, a pulse, a tear in the sky of memory. Cobb spinning his top, eyes fixed on the uncertain, children beyond the horizon, tethered to a wife who may or may not exist. Their desperation is mine: the effort to anchor oneself, to grasp presence, to hold the intangible in trembling hands.

Then I remember a day when the world fractured. A stranger, religious, enigmatic, approached twice, pointing at his forehead, saying: “You have beautiful eyes.” Twice, in different places, in different hours, the words repeated, surreal, uncanny. I wept, lost, my mind spiraling. Reality seemed to fold, to double, to fracture like glass. I clutched my accessories, my totems — my watches, my rings, my keepsakes — trying to secure the present, trying to remind myself: this is real, this is me, this is now.

And yet, inside, another voice echoed. Once, I was told: “Do not search for meaning. It does not exist.” The words hollowed me, emptied the structures I had built, leaving a void. For a moment, the world collapsed inward. And yet, in the small, quiet objects I hold, I find counterpoint. Meaning need not be grand, universal, absolute. It lives in the tangible, the immediate, the emotionally resonant. Totems, then, are both practical and philosophical: they affirm presence, commemorate memory, allow acceptance.

We sacrifice time, feeling, presence. We question why we act as we do, why we fail, why we cannot return to the moments we wished to hold. Yet the objects remain. They are small, silent, and in their stillness, they anchor us. They do not change. They do not vanish. They are proof that life happened, that love happened, that presence mattered.

In Fischer’s pinwheel, in Cobb’s spinning top, in my watches and rings, I see the same truth: even if fabricated, even if planted, the objects become real in the hands that clutch them, in the hearts that mourn and rejoice. They allow release, surrender, letting go of guilt, regret, fear, while still holding memory tenderly.

Accessories are my foundation. They hold fragments of life, of emotion, of presence. They allow me to move through the labyrinth of thought, to question, to feel, to hope. I let go of illusions, yet I hold on to the small, tangible remnants of life: the weight of a watch, the curve of a ring, the pulse of memory in a toy.

Reality, dream, past, present, future — they fold into one another. I spin my own totems, and in their quiet, I am present. And perhaps, in presence alone, the search for meaning is no longer necessary.