The Dress

“Some things are not meant to be worn out. They are meant to carry our stories.”

Do you get attached to things? To clothing, to little keepsakes, to objects connected to people or moments you never want to forget?

And when you look at old photographs…what do you feel?

There are some things I simply cannot let go of.

Not because they are expensive.

Not because they are fashionable.

But because they carry pieces of my life within them.

I’ve always been someone who gets emotionally attached to things, clothing, little objects, handwritten notes, photographs, small tokens that may seem ordinary to others but quietly hold entire memories for me.

I still hold on to my mother’s last bottle of perfume. She passed away in 2010. And here we are 16 years later, in 2026…and I still cannot bring myself to let it go.

There is still a little perfume left inside, and everyone and then, I open the lid just to smell it. For a brief moment, time disappears. The scent takes me back instantly…takes me to her presence, her hugs, her voice, fragments of ordinary days that suddenly feel priceless.

It’s incredible how deeply memory lives inside our senses. A smell, a photograph, a piece of clothing…and suddenly an entire chapter of life reappears.  

Sometimes I look at a dress hanging in my closet and I don’t just see fabric.

I see a moment.

A version of myself.

A season of life that no longer exists except in memory.

For my son’s graduation, I decided to wear the exact same dress I wore on the day of his baptism, 17 years ago .

And when I placed the two photos side by side, one of me holding him as a tiny baby, and another standing beside him as a young man graduating and stepping into adulthood, I felt something difficult to explain.

How can life move this quickly?

One moment, you are carrying them in your arms.

The next, you are watching them build a life of their own.

The dress remained.

But everything else changed.

Maybe that’s why I hold on to certain things, because sometimes objects become anchors for our memories.

They remind us that moments were real.

That time existed.

That love existed exactly as we remember it.

They are no longer just things, they become emotional time capsules, quietly holding the people we loved and the moments we are afraid to lose.

Photographs do this too.

A single image can instantly transport us back to a feeling, a scent, a version of ourselves we thought we had forgotten.

Sometimes I wonder:

Do we get attached to things…

or to the emotions attached to them?

Am I holding onto a dress?

Or am I holding onto the memory of becoming a mother for the first time?

…Maybe both.