I closed the hotel door behind me. It’s only once I was on the other side, the key safely tucked into my pocket, that I realised that I had forgotten a whole bunch of stuff in the room. A bucket of worn miniature cars. Some strange mechanism I inherited from my grandfather. Small construction bricks made of soft plastic. A pair of still functioning walkie-talkies, without batteries. Rubber creatures with missing limbs. Crates of dog-eared notebooks full of unreadable scrawls. Bizarre novelty toys that never worked. A soot-stained building façade. Twenty metres of street pavement. Strips of adhesive tape no longer adhesive, but slightly sticky. Keys without a lock. A vial containing a drop of oxidised quicksilver. A barrel full of green glowing liquid, possibly radioactive. A flat transparent ruler with a broken tip and most of its tick marks erased. Half a pair of scissors. A vial containing a pinch of reddish dirt. Locks without a key. Dried up felt pens that were once of many colours, now all brown. Torn limbs from amputee rubber creatures. A girl with a ponytail. Pink erasers turned grey and powdery. Little crumbs of unidentifiable origin. Squares of cardboard with numbers on them. One shiny ball, still shiny. Elastic bands turned brittle. Tangles of strings. Some old people, with wrinkles and liver spots. A creaking staircase made of 19th century wood. A few kilometres of flammable celluloid. A jar full of rusted paper clips. Another jar with demagnetised magnets. Ballpoint pens with their top gnawed off.

I turned back, entered the room again.

The room was clean, neat, and empty. Those things I had left behind were