Editor's Note

I had a protein bar in my bag for months. It wasn’t there because I really liked the flavor, or because I ever actually planned to eat it. It was there because having it felt like the responsible thing to do — a small, sealed backup plan for a version of the day that might go slightly wrong. I carried it because I imagined, vaguely, that at some point I’d find myself in lab for too many hours on end, or stranded somewhere right before a midterm with no other form of sustenance in sight, and I’d need something that quietly proved I thought ahead. 

This protein bar moved with me through ordinary days. I would feel it sometimes when I reached for something else, a small squared-off presence in the pocket, and think: “Right, that’s there.” And then immediately forget about it again. The bar was meant to remain there until I flipped my bag upside down over a trash can to dump out the miscellaneous contents at the end of the term. 

Yesterday, I ate that protein bar. There wasn’t much of a decision involved. It just stopped making sense for it to still be in my bag, so I opened it and ate it, as if that were the most natural way for it to leave. Now the pocket is empty. I’ve been noticing it in small, automatic moments, when I reach into my bag and expect the familiar shape to be there, and it isn’t. 

This week in Mirror, we take another look at the familiar. One writer speaks to the baker of Collis Cafe's fresh bagels about the process of distributing over 1,000 bagels per day. Our relationship columnists contemplate navigating hookup culture within the queer community at Dartmouth.

It’s strange how long I carried something I never needed, and how normal that felt. How many small objects like that do we move through the world with — quiet placeholders for versions of life that rarely arrive, but that we keep preparing for anyway? And how simple it turned out to be to use one of them, and realize there was never really anything it was protecting me from in the first place.