Sticky tack was by definition designed to be temporary, but somehow it’s been the most permanent thing in my life. The first time I moved, my dad handed me a palm-sized cardboard box with a plastic shell cradling off-white squares, and told me that I could use it to stick glow-in-the-dark stars above my bed. He called it “bed glue,” and the name stuck almost as well as the stars did. 
The beauty of sticky tack is that it never leaves a mark on the wall, and yet it’s managed to leave a deep one in me. Every time we moved again, I peeled those same white blobs off one wall and pressed them into another. They carried the residue of every room, like ghosts of the  constellations I traced to fall asleep.
By eighth grade, I had walked through the front doors of eight different schools. Moving so often could have left me lost, but instead it taught me something my lump of sticky tack already knew: memories don’t belong to drywall, they cling to people. To laughter spilling across unpacked rooms, to my dad joking about “bed blue,” to the resilience it takes to pack up your life and click play again. 
Sticky tack may be soft, but it gave me a hard truth. Permanence isn’t about plaster or paint, it’s about the courage to carry your stars with you, and the adaptability to make any ceiling feel like home. 

– AT

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