I break things all the time. I have what one would call butterfingers. I got this trait from my mom along with wide feet that make us hard to knock over and making a total disaster area of the kitchen while cooking.

Just last week, I had to buy a new cell phone because I finally dropped my old phone one too many times and the screen shattered. My old phone survived three years of being dropped repeatedly, which I think is a pretty long life of being dropped for a sensitive electronic device. When I bought the new one, I specifically asked the guy at the store how durable it was. I also asked for a case that will protect my fancy new phone when I drop it. I would have liked to use the conjunction “if” instead of “when”, but I know myself too well and it’s inevitable that I will drop it, probably way more than once. Besides, my old phone, with its spiderweb of shattered glass, served as a testament that I am not so good with gravity. I haven’t dropped the new one yet, but give it time.

When I carry my laptop around, I make sure I have a death grip on it. I’m scared to death that I’ll drop it, it will cease higher functioning, I will lose all of my creative efforts, and most importantly, I will have to buy a new one. This fancy-ass machine of mine cost over $2,000, which to me, is a terrible lot of money, but I use it for my livelihood and therefore, it’s tax-deductible and entirely necessary. I work on it, I write on it, I live on it. I have never dropped it. I did drop a Mac tower at work once. Fortunately, it still worked and no one was the wiser.

The most expensive thing I’ve ever broken is a car. It’s probably the same for most people since, besides a house, a car is the most expensive thing your average person is likely to buy. It’s much more difficult to break a house than a car. That’s mostly because houses don’t generally collide with other houses when driving down the road. I’ve broken many cars in my life. Most of them were inexpensive in the grand scheme of things, but since I’ve been part of the elite class of working poor since I started working at the age of fifteen, inexpensive is relative. When you’re still in high school and are making less than twenty thousand dollars a year, a few thousand of that spent on a car is a ridiculous lot of money. I try not to drop my cars just like I try not to drop my phones, but gravity is a bitch. It makes it so that, if you do drop a car or a phone, the results are likely to be very much the opposite of a good thing.

However, the most priceless item I’ve ever broken is my brain. In my late teens, my skull was smashed by a stage light. It ruined the version of me to which I had become accustomed and turned me into a walking vegetable with the memory of a goldfish. I had to rebuild my brain from the ground up and it was never as good as the original. But, I have become used to my broken brain. We get along as well as can be expected. I don’t rely on it as much as I used to though. Now, I rely much more on my fancy new phone to remember things in its place. Animals only get one brain and there is no replacing it if it gets broken. There is no guarantee or warranty, no returns policy. If you break it, you have to live with it as it is and we need our brains for positively everything. The remarkable thing about a brain though, unlike a phone or a car, is that it can fix itself to a limited extent given enough time. Still, I would not recommend dropping heavy items on your brain if at all possible.