This small stainless-steel cup is the oldest object I own. It originally belonged to a children's dining set that included a matching plate and a spoon-fork, from which I ate and drank throughout my childhood in Brazil. As I grew older, the set naturally passed to my younger brother. Years later, during one of her visits to Paris, my mother quietly brought the cup back to me together with the spoon-fork. The plate never returned, and somehow that feels perfectly right.

Unlike every other object in this archive, this one was never collected. It existed long before I began consciously choosing the things that would accompany my life. Today it has become something else entirely: the oldest surviving witness to my childhood and perhaps the closest thing I possess to a family heirloom. Its incompleteness has never diminished its meaning. On the contrary, it reminds me that memory rarely survives intact. Like every archive, it is assembled from what remains.