Sometimes, it’s not just the songs, but also the devices you use that remind you of happier times.

The first time you caught Stacy playing with it, she was sitting on the steps leading up to her house, waiting for you to pick her up for a party.

“What is that?” you asked. “What are you twirling around on your fingers?”

“Huh?” She shook her head and blinked at you a few times, as if her attention had just snapped back from some faraway place. “Oh. It’s just an old Samsung Modus Bluetooth Headset Kit a friend of mine gave me.” Then she hopped to her feet and bounded towards the car. “Come on! We’re going to be late!”

The next time was at the coffee shop weeks later. She was staring blankly out the storefront window, the cord of the Mono/Stereo convertible headset’s earpieces winding and unwinding around her fingers over and over again. You set her drink in front of her and she barely noticed you’d come back. “Do you need to make a phone call or something? Or, I mean, if just want to sit here and listen to some music…”

“Nope,” she answered, smiling and quickly placing the headset back in her purse like it was nothing before taking a sip of her latte. “So what did you think of the movie? Personally, I thought the plot had a few holes.”

It shouldn’t have been weird or bugged you, but the more you caught her doing it, the more mysterious it became. You never saw her using it with a Bluetooth-enabled device. She was always just speaking into her phone when a call came, so the dual-microphone noise and echo-canceling technologies were useless to her. Her phone was even an Android, yet she never downloaded the special app for added advance functionality. It was just there sitting in her purse, this headset that had no purpose other than to get fiddled with at odd times when no one was looking.

It was in the bookstore that you spied her twisting it around her hands for the eighth time and finally asked her just “why the hell” she “keeps playing with that stupid headset all the time,” adding just how much the act annoys you for punctuation. That was the same day she quietly pursed her lips, uncoiled the headset from around her thumb, and walked out the book store door. She didn’t turn around when you followed her out. She didn’t say a word as she stepped into a cab. She never returned your phone calls. You never saw her again.

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