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The Index of Borrowed Recall

 

I have come to realize that my watch collection is not a collection at all. It is, in practice, an external hard drive for my own history.

​For years, I told myself that the obsession was rooted in horology—the mechanics, the aesthetics, the history of the manufacturers. But recently, I have had to confront a quieter, more unsettling truth: I have offloaded my memory to my wrists. When I look back at the last several years of my life, I find that I do not remember the events themselves with any distinct clarity. I remember the watch I was wearing when they occurred.

​If you were to ask me about the summer of 2023, I would not describe the weather, the conversations, or the emotional timbre of the months. I would describe the specific, fading tritium lume of the diver I wore every day that season. The watch is the primary record; my mind is merely the secondary backup.

​The Displacement of Self

​There is a strange, clinical distance in this realization. It feels as though I have outsourced the act of "being" to mechanical movements.

​My memories have become anchored to these objects. When I hold the chronograph I wore during the transition into my current career path, I do not just recall the stress of the interviews or the uncertainty of the change. I recall the texture of the crown, the specific way the pushers felt under my thumb when I would fidget during a long wait in a sterile lobby. The object has usurped the experience.

​I find myself wondering if I am even capable of accessing these memories without the prompt of the hardware. If I were to remove the watch from the box, would the memory attached to it—the specific feeling of that time—simply vanish, like a file deleted from an unmounted drive?

​The Archive as an Anatomy

​This system of reliance is not sentimental. It is functional, and in a way, terrifying. It implies that my past is not a continuous narrative, but a series of distinct, partitioned segments defined by the hardware on my wrist.

​I look at the dresser where I keep them, and I see a timeline of myself that I no longer fully inhabit. There is the watch from the months of isolation; there is the watch from the period of intense professional restructuring. They are cold, precise markers. I do not look at them with the warmth of nostalgia. I look at them with the scrutiny of an archivist checking the integrity of a record.

​The Fragility of the Archive

​The danger, of course, lies in the permanence of the object. We are taught that memories are intangible, resilient things that reside in the mind. I have proven that wrong—or perhaps, I have simply found a way to make them as breakable as a balance staff.

​I have come to understand that losing a watch would not be a matter of financial replacement. It would be an act of erasure. To lose one of these pieces would be to lose the physical anchor for an entire era of my life. It would be the sudden, silent amputation of a version of time that no longer exists, leaving me with a gap in my own history that I would be entirely unable to fill.

​I look at the collection now and I do not see tools. I see the only proof I have that I was ever there.

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