There is a drawer in every home that nobody talks about. You know the one. It sits in the kitchen, or perhaps a hallway cabinet, and it is technically a drawer but functionally a small universe. It contains batteries of unknown charge, a single chopstick, expired coupons, a key to a lock that no longer exists, and — always, always — rolls of electrical tape.
This is the story of three such rolls. And before you dismiss them as mundane objects resting on a wooden surface, understand this: they have been waiting a very long time to be seen.
The blue one is the oldest. His name, if tape can have names, is Solomon.
Solomon is wide where the others are narrow, thick where they are thin, and carries himself with the quiet gravitas of something that has seen too much. He was purchased in 1987 from a hardware shop in a town that no longer exists under that name. His original owner was an electrician named Raymond, who smelled of instant coffee and wore the same grey jacket every single day regardless of weather, season, or occasion.
Raymond used Solomon for everything. Not just electrical work — though there was plenty of that, miles of wiring in housing estates, junction boxes in the rain, frayed cables on construction sites where men shouted over machinery and ate sandwiches from greaseproof paper. Raymond also used Solomon to patch the torn seat of his van, to label his lunch in the communal fridge at the depot (SOL — DO NOT EAT, though it never worked), to mark the height of his daughter on the kitchen doorframe every birthday, a thin blue stripe ascending upward each year like hope made visible.
When Raymond retired, he gave his tools away. The good ones went to colleagues. The lesser ones went to his son, who had no interest in electrical work but accepted them politely. Solomon ended up in a box, then a drawer, then another home entirely, passed along through a garage sale to a young woman named Priya who bought him for fifty cents because she was fixing a lamp and thought he would do the job. He did. But she forgot about him afterward.
Solomon does not mind being forgotten. He has learned that the forgotten things are often the most essential. He rests now on the wooden surface in this photograph and thinks about Raymond's daughter, whose name was June, and wonders how tall she grew.
The teal one — that vivid, electric, almost-too-beautiful green — arrived much later and under very different circumstances. She calls herself Marina, though she was manufactured in a factory outside of Shenzhen and given no name at all by the humans who made her.
Marina was bought in bulk. Forty-eight rolls in a plastic bag, sold at a market stall between phone cases and extension cords. She was one of the lucky ones — chosen early, separated from her identical sisters, brought home by a teenager named Ezra who needed to colour-code the cables behind his gaming setup. This was important work to Ezra. Perhaps the most important work he did in 2019, which was also the year he fell in love for the first time, failed his mathematics exam, and learned to cook exactly one dish — pasta with tinned tomatoes and too much garlic — which he would eat for the rest of his life and never tire of.
Marina marked the HDMI cable. Then the power strip. Then she was pressed into service labelling the cables for Ezra's keyboard, his monitor, his controller charger. She was good at her job, and she knew it. Teal stands out. That was her gift and her purpose — to be unmistakable in a world full of black and white and grey.
But then Ezra left for university and packed in a hurry and left Marina behind. She ended up with his mother, Diane, who put her in the kitchen drawer — yes, that drawer — and occasionally found her useful for tasks Marina considered beneath her dignity, like sealing a plastic bag of rice or temporarily fixing a cracked plant pot.
Still. She adapted. Marina has always believed that usefulness is not diminished by context. A teal tape sealing rice is still teal tape. Still unmistakable. Still here.
The red one has the most complicated story, as red things often do.
His name is — and this will seem strange — Tuesday. He was named this not by a person but by a habit, because he was always, inexplicably, found on a Tuesday. Purchased on a Tuesday. Used for the first time on a Tuesday (to wrap a cracked hammer handle on a building site in Colombo, 2011). Lost behind a workbench on a Tuesday. Rediscovered in a coat pocket on a Tuesday — a different coat, a different year, a different country entirely.
Tuesday is the most well-travelled of the three. He has been on an airplane, packed in a checked bag alongside souvenir magnets and a slightly crushed box of biscuits. He has sat in a toolbox in Malaysia, a bathroom cabinet in Singapore, a borrowed backpack in Melbourne. He has been used to fix a sandal on a rainy afternoon, to childproof a cabinet, to label a jar of dried chilli, and once — memorably — to hold together the broken spine of a beloved notebook belonging to a woman named Carla who was writing the first and last pages of a novel she never finished.
Carla used to say that the best stories are the ones held together with tape and stubbornness. She was right about this, as she was right about most things. The novel was abandoned, but the notebook was kept. The tape held.
Tuesday carries Carla with him the way certain objects carry certain people — not as a weight, but as a warmth. A residue of significance.
Now here they are. The three of them. Solomon, Marina, Tuesday. Blue, teal, red. On a wooden surface that is neither remarkable nor unremarkable, in a room, in a home, in a life that is ongoing and full of small necessities.
They did not choose each other's company any more than strangers on a bus choose theirs. And yet here they are, together, in a photograph taken on what appears to be an ordinary day — the light suggesting late afternoon, the wood surface suggesting a table or counter or shelf, the whole scene suggesting nothing urgent, nothing dramatic, nothing that will make the news.
But that is the point.
The world runs on the things that don't make the news. The patched cables and the labelled jars. The cracked handles held together through one more job. The heights marked on doorframes. The notebooks kept long after the words inside them stopped.
Every household has its version of Solomon, Marina, and Tuesday. Objects that arrived with purpose and stayed with presence. Objects that sat in the background of photographs and the corners of drawers while the humans around them fell in love, grew taller, left for university, forgot to finish their novels, cooked too much garlic pasta at midnight.
The tape holds.
It always holds.
That is, when you think about it, a remarkable thing to say about anything.
Solomon shifts slightly on the wooden surface. Marina catches the light. Tuesday rests easy, as those who have travelled far often do.
Somewhere, in a house that may or may not still stand, there is a kitchen doorframe with faded blue stripes at varying heights. The tallest one reaches 168 centimetres.
June grew up just fine.
Afterthoughts for Readers
On ordinary objects and the stories they hold
We live in an age obsessed with the new, the sleek, and the significant. We document our meals and our travels and our milestones, but we rarely stop to photograph the roll of tape on the counter — and when we do, we rarely ask why it's there, where it's been, whose hands have held it.
Every object in your home arrived from somewhere. It passed through factories and shipping containers and market stalls and the hands of strangers before it became yours. And every time it was used, it absorbed a little of that moment. A little of that person.
On the value of mundane things
There is a Japanese concept called mono no aware — the bittersweet awareness of impermanence, often felt in the presence of the most ordinary things. A worn roll of tape, nearly used up, carries this beautifully. It is almost gone. It was almost enough.
A question to leave with you
Go find the most unremarkable object in your home right now — the thing you reach for without thinking, the thing that has been there so long you've stopped seeing it. Hold it for a moment. Ask where it came from. Ask what it has fixed, held, sealed, saved.
You might be surprised what answers arrive.
The best stories are always the ones held together with tape and stubbornness.
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