Les héroïnes n'ont jamais peur.

In my spare time - which is not truly 'spare' like a 'spare' tire or 'spare' pencil if you think about it, it's just tax-free time that you are given permission to spend at your discretion - I save things.

Bags from Harry's and Whole Foods and boutiques because the smell and crackle of the recycled paper excites me, ugly pens that people drop on purpose, books that Border's puts on shelves and boxes because freestyle literature and MadLibs are no longer coffee-table staples, things like that.

I save things in jars, like buttons from my grandmother's slips when she gains a few pounds and insists on flexible materials and shells that didn't actually come from a body of water but rather a hole in my backyard in which I buried a leaking Beanie Babie that was beyond surgical help. Or, you know. Flowers, branches, ladybugs that look as if they need a place to stay.

There are also the glass bottles. I put them behind sweaters in my closet when I have company so I will not have to respond when they state things I was not aware of, such as, "But they're empty."

Every bottle contains a noise, like the sound of paper rustling which calms me down, a song I may have heard in the backdrop of a really intense movie scene, a conversation on the metro, a voice or two I will never hear again that I store away because I have athazagoraphobia, which incidentally puts me in an awkward situation when I explain my problem - like people who have to say 'hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia', which must cause a number of unreported panic attacks - because I forget the word nine times out of ten - and I want to have a backup plan for my life and memories besides harddrives because that is kind of dorky and I do not put much stock in technology anyways.

I refuse to label these glass bottles (which once consisted mostly of old French sparkling fruit juices such as pomegranate-lemon which makes me weak in the knees), and remove any labeling they might have previously had. Even if I let someone in on the collection, they usually ask me to open it so that they might hear it too, which elicits from me what is probably a pretty rude stare that says something along the lines of, "Are you retarded or something?"

Everyone knows that if you open the bottle, the sounds will fly out through the top and make some horrible whistling, howling sound as they rush between the cracks of the window and scatter down the street like some kind of Pandora's Box.