The Collapse CLXVIII: What Is In Your Wallet?

 23 September 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

One of the habits I have maintained throughout the past year, as senseless as it now seems, is carrying a wallet.

It is something that, upon thinking about it, has been a habit for time out of mind: for years, just before I left the house, I would pull out my wallet from its storage location and place it in my back pocket (and my keys in the front). Even when the smartphone crazed emerged and people started carrying their minimal wallets on the back of their phones, I persevered carrying my wallet – not only because of the fact that the entire “all your cards on the back of a phone” seemed like an accident waiting to happen, but because being anywhere without a wallet in my left back pocket when I was out of the house simply felt wrong.

I had not even paid attention to it until this very morning when, getting ready to go outside and work, I instinctively reached out and started to put in in my back pocket. I paused, sat down, and pulled it out.

What is inside the wallet now? A collection of things that even a year ago would not have seemed unusual: A driver’s license for a state that may or may not exist. A bank and credit card that will not function without electricity and data. A card for a warehouse store that likely it not open nor can a I get to. That plethora of smaller cards that inevitably seems to build up over time: insurance cards, roadside assistance cards, the occasional membership card. A smattering of change that I carry as habit from years ago when one of my children was always asking for the commemorative pennies (two quarters and a penny per souvenir generation). A half dollar piece I carry for luck as they were so rarely received anymore.

In the billfold? A smattering of bills that only hold value as a fire-starter now. And various fortunes from Chinese fortune cookies that meant something to me over the years.

I remember getting my father and grandfather’s wallets when they had passed. Theirs, too, had the same collection of official documents, random items, and small bills in them – along with photographs, which was the fashion once upon a time (but feel out fashion even during my years). I have them tucked away somewhere here, small artifacts of them and their daily lives as they, too, carried one every day.

Could I go out now without the wallet? Of course I could and my life would be no different: it is not as if I am likely to get pulled over at this point and need a license or need to present a card for anything or even be held up for the contents of my wallet.

And yet, to not carry it would seem unnatural.

Call me a sentimental fool Lucilius, a man who remains slightly out of time from the world that he lives in, if in a different way that before. But in my mind and beyond just the physical presence, a wallet remains a constant reminder of a world that seems gone, even if only for a little while. And in keeping that wallet, perhaps on a more personal level than some other things, it feels as if I am keeping that memory alive, along with the memories of those that have gone before and in turn, carried their wallets.

Although, I suppose, the joy at my age of being asked for my ID to purchase an alcoholic drink will never come again.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca