The Batteries You Forgot to Replace

You buy the wireless keyboard the next Tuesday, on your lunch break, because the wired one is frayed and you’re tired of the clutter. It uses two AA batteries. You have no AAs. You use the old keyboard for three more days, the cord snaking across your desk. On Saturday, you remember the batteries while you’re at the grocery store. You’re in the dairy aisle. You tell yourself you’ll get them on the way out. You forget.

The keyboard sits in its box on the shelf above your monitor. A week later, your wife needs a USB drive for a presentation. You know there’s one in the keyboard box. You take it, leave the box open. The keyboard is now a USB drive repository. You use the old keyboard for another month. The ‘S’ key starts sticking. You order a mechanical keyboard, a splurge, because you deserve a nice tool for your work. It arrives. It’s glorious. The old, frayed one goes in a drawer. The new wireless one stays in the box. You’ll return it.

You don’t return it. The return window closes. The box, with the keyboard and the two missing AA slots, goes into the storage loft. You tell yourself it’s a backup. Your personal project—the app you were sketching at Starbucks—lives in a GitHub repo called ‘sundays.’ You last committed to it the Saturday before the relatives came. The README file is a single sentence: “A cleaner way to track recipes.”

At a team offsite six months later, a junior developer named Priya demos a side project. It’s a recipe manager that auto-converts serving sizes. It’s elegant. Someone asks if she’ll publish it. She says maybe. You feel a hollow click behind your ribs, like a key turning in a lock that’s been empty for years. You do not mention your GitHub repo. You congratulate her. You use the right tone.

The monsoon is heavy that year. A leak develops in the storage loft. The cardboard box softens, then sags. When you finally check, the keyboard is fine, sealed in plastic. The box is ruined. You transfer the keyboard to a plastic bin. You see the battery compartment, still empty. You close the lid.

You buy the batteries on a Wednesday. You leave them in their blister pack on the kitchen counter. They migrate to the junk drawer, next to expired coupons and a single blunt pencil. You clean the drawer out in the spring. You throw the batteries away. They were the wrong size anyway.