Rock

I have this rock.

And I don't know why.

I found it in my dorm room when I was packing to move home from college. It's nothing special -- small, grey, smooth, oval-ish and sorta flat. I had no idea where I got it or why I kept it, but I packed it with everything else and came home.

Then, a couple of nights ago, I was digging through all of that crap looking for something (something I didn't find, of course), and I came across the rock again.

And here it sits on my desk, still avoiding the trash or the back yard, and I'm still not sure why. Did I pick it up at random in Troy? Could be. Did I swipe it from the beach at Peppercombe in England? Maybe. Did someone give it to me for some reason? It's possible.

I think that at this point, it's taken on a new value, a new reason to keep it instead of just chucking it off the back porch. Now, this little rock represents possibilities, a mystery, a past life that this rock had that I've lost somewhere in the recesses of my own memory.

After all, what are we but our memories? If we lose our past, don't we lose a lot of what we are, our identities, the meaning behind our existence?

Is this rock trying to remind me of something else I've lost? Or is it enough that I've lost the history of the rock itself? I can't help but think that it's significant in some way, because why would I have kept it otherwise? Why did I pick it up from wherever I got it and hold onto it in the first place? It's an enigma.