A misplaced heirloom watch reappearing in plain sight dismantled my rational worldview
For years, I dismissed tales of object teleportation or reality shifts as mere confabulation, firmly rooted in the belief that everything has a logical, if mundane, explanation. My conviction shattered last autumn when my grandfather's pocket watch, missing for a decade and presumed lost during a move, materialized on my kitchen counter exactly where I had just placed my groceries. I had emptied that counter moments before, and no one else was in the house. The watch was cold to the touch, its hands frozen at the time it was last seen, and it bore a scratch I vividly remembered from childhood. This wasn't a case of forgetting where I put it; its absence was a documented family mystery we had long given up on. That moment of impossible return challenged every assumption I held about linear time and possession. I now suspect that what we call glitches are not errors, but brief apertures in a system far more complex than we perceive. Letting go of pure materialism has been unsettling, yet it opens the door to marveling at the unexplained rather than explaining it away.