A few years ago, he stopped expecting borrowed things to come back.
Not because people always returned them. The opposite.
Some books never came back. An umbrella found a new home. A jacket started a second life somewhere else. A ballpen quietly changed owners.
At first, he remembered every item. Then something strange happened. He forgot them.
Not on purpose. Just naturally. Life moved on. New projects arrived. New songs filled the space. Eventually, he accepted that those things were gone.
What stayed wasn’t the loss of the object. It was what the loss revealed.
When people talk about borrowing, they usually think about the thing itself. The book. The money. The object. But every borrowed item comes with something invisible attached to it: trust.
A borrowed item is a small promise. It says, “This isn’t mine, but I’ll take care of it.” It says, “You can count on me.” The item might be worth a few pesos. The trust behind it can be worth much more.
That’s why returning something matters even when the owner isn’t asking for it back. Maybe the owner already replaced it. Maybe the owner forgot about it. Maybe the owner doesn’t even care anymore.
But returning it proves something about the borrower. It proves they remember. It proves they respect what belongs to others. It proves their word has weight.
He accepted long ago that some of his things were gone forever. That’s fine. Objects come and go. Most of them become memories anyway. What he hopes is that the people who never returned them don’t make a habit of doing the same thing to others.
Because after enough missing books, missing umbrellas, missing loans, and missing promises, people become more careful. Just more careful.
And that’s the real cost. The book disappears once. The trust disappears a little at a time.
⌨ ᴛʸᵖⁱⁿᵍ ᴏᵘᵗ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ʙˡᵘᵉ ᵈᵃʳᵉᵐ ᵐᵘˢⁱᶜ ᵇˡᵒᵍ