Every house has exactly one drawer that is slowly becoming a different house

It starts with batteries and a spare key. Then rubber bands, a manual for an appliance you no longer own, one chopstick, a coin from a country you have never visited. Nobody puts these things there on purpose. They arrive.

Give it a decade and the drawer has its own climate. It has rooms: the takeaway-menu wing, the dead-pen quarter. Open it carefully and you can almost hear it settling, the way old houses do at night.

You do not own the junk drawer. You are the house it is growing inside of.