The Bag on the Shelf

There is a Prada tote in neon green sitting somewhere in my home that I have carried exactly three times.

I bought it when I was a buyer at Browns — part uniform allowance, part statement, entirely intentional. At the time, I was someone who moved through the fashion industry with the kind of confidence that makes a neon green Prada tote feel like a natural extension of yourself. Not a risk. A declaration.

I loved it immediately. I still do.

And yet.

The bag has spent most of its life not being carried. I have told myself various things about this. That neon green is not a naturally occurring colour — which is true, and which I notice now in a way I never used to. That it stands out. That people will look. These are facts I once would have received as compliments and now sometimes receive as warnings.

What changed was not the bag.

There was a period — not so long ago — when going outside felt like too much. Not dramatically, not all at once, but in the quiet, cumulative way that anxiety rearranges your life while you're busy trying to hold it together. The world shrank. The opportunities to carry a neon green Prada tote shrank with it. And somewhere in that shrinking, I think I also started to wonder whether I was still the kind of person who carries one.

This is what objects do that we rarely talk about. They hold a version of you. They sit there, patient and inanimate, keeping the faith on your behalf — waiting for you to catch up with who you were when you bought them, or to become someone new enough to carry them differently.

The bag is not unworn because I don't love it. It is unworn because loving it requires something of me. It requires me to be visible. To take up space in a colour that does not apologise. To walk into a room and let the bag say: I am here, and I am not trying to be subtle about it.

Some days that feels easy. Some days it feels like the bravest thing I could do.

I think I'm getting back there. I think the bag knows.