was looking at my beat-up carrying case for my nintendo switch. it's covered in eevee and its various evolutions; i have no specific fondness for eevee but it was definitely the cutest one i could find when i was in the market for a case. i bought it from a small Guatemalan company on etsy.
i describe it as beat-up but honestly, it really isn't; it's a bit worn in places, but it still does its job perfectly well. it doesn't have any holes in it and the zipper still works. some people might see the stains and browning on the case and replace it, but i'm the kind of person who uses things until they're unusable.
i have a princess peach nintendo 3DS case i bought at the nintendo store in new york probably a full decade ago. it looks pretty bad at this point. the bright pinks gave way to deep browns and greys with use; there are noticeable marks where i overfilled the case to store things like USB charging cables and a small foldout DS/3DS card case.
was i ever expected to use these objects for this long? did the person who assembled my switch case expect that i would still be using it in six years? what about the random people who worked on my 3DS case?
i have a fan in my room that i've used since the bush administration. it's a standing oscillating fan, though it no longer oscillates; instead, the control for the oscillation simply spins in place while the fan runs. but run the fan does; i clean it maybe once every year or two, and it keeps going. dozens, if not hundreds of people were involved in that fan's creation. do any of them ever think about the things they made, whether they're still being used? (odds are, probably, but not very many.)
when sorting my things i start to wonder about them. a zine from a comics convention i went to ages ago, a book for a forgotten webcomic, obscure pieces of character paraphernalia. how many of these exist, still? what if i'm the only person in the world who still has an intact copy of something?
there will come a day where my case falls apart. my fan will break down. a zine will get lost in a move. and there will be a day, someday, where the very last one of those things vanishes from this earth.
and someday, someone will be the last person to ever read something i've written.
