Stickers
On keeping things whole, and the things time takes while we’re busy keeping them.
I used to collect stickers as a kid.
The cute ones. The shiny ones. The ones with little animals, cartoon characters, and things I couldn’t explain why I liked. I liked having them. I liked arranging them, looking at them, keeping them somewhere safe. But there was one thing I rarely did.
I didn’t stick them anywhere.
I was afraid that once I peeled a sticker from its backing and pressed it onto a surface, I could never get it back the way it was. The paper might tear. The shape might get ruined. The adhesive might lose its hold. Whatever I chose to stick it on would become its permanent home, and I wasn’t ready to make that decision.
So I kept them in their sheets.
Untouched. Unused. Whole.
I thought I was preserving them.
Years later, I realized the adhesive had started to dry out. Some stickers no longer stuck to anything. Others had curled at the edges, as if they were slowly trying to leave the paper themselves. I had spent so much time protecting them from the wrong kind of damage that I hadn’t noticed time was doing its own work.
I could still look at them.
I just couldn’t use them anymore.
It’s a ridiculous thing to feel sad about, isn’t it? Stickers. Little pieces of paper I bought because I liked how they looked. But every now and then, I think about the child who kept saving them for the perfect place, the perfect notebook, the perfect moment, and wonder how many things we learn to treat that way as we grow older.
How many things do we keep untouched because we are afraid of what choosing them might cost us?
Maybe it’s a dress we save for an occasion that never comes. A notebook too beautiful to write in. A perfume we use sparingly because we don’t want to run out. A message we keep rewriting because sending it means we can no longer pretend we haven’t said what we wanted to say.
We tell ourselves we are waiting for the right time.
Sometimes, we are.
But sometimes, I think, we are just afraid that once something becomes part of our lives, it can no longer remain the perfect thing we imagined it to be.
An unused notebook can still hold every possible story. The moment you write in it, you have to choose the first one. A dress hanging in a closet can belong to every version of yourself you imagine becoming. The moment you wear it, it belongs to the person who actually showed up that day.
And a sticker, sitting safely on its sheet, can still go anywhere.
Until it can’t.
I wonder if this is how we treat people, too.
Not always by refusing to love them, but by being so careful with the possibility of them that we never quite let the relationship become real. We keep our feelings tucked away. We wait for the right timing, the right words, the right sign that we won’t regret it. We want to know where something will end before we allow ourselves to begin.
As if knowing the ending could protect us from what happens in the middle.
But there is no backing paper for a life. No way to peel ourselves away from an experience and return to the exact person we were before it happened.
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To love someone is to let them leave marks on you. To try something is to accept that it might not work. To make a choice is to let some other possibilities remain possibilities.
Maybe that’s what makes choosing so difficult. We don’t only choose what we want. We also give up the comfort of keeping everything else available.
And sometimes, we would rather preserve the possibility than risk the reality.
I understand that impulse. There is comfort in things that haven’t happened yet. Nobody can reject you in a conversation you haven’t started. Nobody can leave a relationship that never had a name. Nobody can tell you that your dream isn’t what you thought it would be if you never attempt to live it.
But an untouched life is still a life passing.
The stickers taught me that, in their small, stupid way.
I could have put them on my notebooks. On my drawers. On the things I carried to school. They could have become part of the ordinary days I would eventually remember. Maybe some would have peeled at the corners. Maybe others would have faded. Maybe I would have grown tired of them and covered them with something else.
At least they would have been there.
At least I would have known what it felt like to choose a place for something I loved, even if that place wasn’t forever.
Instead, I kept them safe from every possibility except time.
And time, as it turns out, doesn’t need our permission.
I don’t think this means we should spend everything immediately, say everything we feel, or throw ourselves into every possibility just because it might disappear. Some things deserve patience. Some choices need thought. There are things we protect because they are precious, and that is not always fear.
But I wonder when protection becomes postponement. When being careful becomes a way of avoiding the life we say we want.
How long can we keep waiting for the perfect place before we admit that maybe there isn’t one?
Maybe the notebook doesn’t need to be filled with the best thing we will ever write. Maybe the dress doesn’t need a special occasion. Maybe the sticker doesn’t need to match the surface perfectly.
Maybe we can let things become ordinary.
Maybe we can let them be used, loved, changed, and eventually worn out.
I still think about those stickers sometimes. I wonder what I would have chosen to put them on. I wonder whether I would even remember them now if I had used them, or whether they would have disappeared into the background of my childhood, doing exactly what stickers are meant to do.
I suppose I’ll never know.
But I think I would rather have a faded sticker on an old notebook than a perfect one that never left its sheet.
At least one of them would have lived somewhere.
And maybe that’s what I want for the things I love, too.
Not to keep them whole forever.
Not to make sure nothing changes.
Just to let them occupy a space in my life while there is still time for them to do so.
Because one day, even the things we carefully save will lose their stickiness.
And we will be left holding something perfectly preserved, wondering why it can no longer stay.
