Objects Worth Loving

My first phone I loved the way you love something you can’t believe you actually own. I charged it carefully, kept it in a specific pocket, would have been genuinely gutted to lose it. The iPhone I carry now I treat like a transit card—functional, replaceable, and I couldn’t tell you which model it is without checking. It exists. That’s enough. Somewhere between the first phone and this one, I stopped caring.

Meitu, a Chinese company known mainly for their beauty camera software, released a Sailor Moon edition phone and briefly threatened to reverse this. I am, without exaggeration, possibly the most committed Sailor Moon fan outside Japan. This became a problem for my finances.

The hardware is real: dual Sony cameras, a 5.2-inch display, 4GB of RAM, around five hundred euros. The kind of price that needs no justification if you’re already the person who would buy a Sailor Moon phone, and requires all the justification in the world if you’re not. I am clearly the first kind of person.

There’s something about Sailor Moon I’ve never been able to reduce to pure nostalgia—it’s not just that I watched it young. The show understood something about transformation and identity that still holds up when I think about it seriously. Wrapping that iconography around an object I touch two hundred times a day sounds right to me. Like something I’d actually care about losing again.