What Do You Think It Means?
# My Girlfriend Left This Small Glass Stick at My Apartment, and I Was Too Embarrassed to Ask About It. Here’s What I Learned.
There are moments in life when something completely ordinary can become strangely mysterious.
For me, it was a small glass stick.
It was sitting on the edge of my bathroom sink one Saturday morning, looking so out of place that I immediately wondered how it had gotten there. It was about the length of my palm, narrow, smooth, and transparent. One end was slightly rounded, while the other looked almost perfectly flat.
It wasn’t something I recognized.
And because my girlfriend had stayed at my apartment the night before, I naturally assumed it belonged to her.
That should have made things simple.
It didn’t.
Instead of picking it up and asking her what it was, I stared at it for several seconds, then looked away as though the object had somehow caught me doing something wrong.
I wish I could say I immediately behaved like a mature adult and asked a simple question.
I didn’t.
I became embarrassed.
Not because there was anything obviously inappropriate about the object. There wasn’t. The problem was that I didn’t know what it was, and my imagination started filling in the gaps.
My girlfriend and I had been dating for several months. We were comfortable with each other, but we were still learning the little details of one another’s lives. There were things I knew about her very well—her favorite foods, the music she played when she was cooking, the way she always checked her phone twice before leaving the house, and the fact that she could never fall asleep without having at least one glass of water beside the bed.
But there were also countless small things I didn’t know.
Apparently, this was one of them.
I picked up the glass stick carefully.
It was surprisingly smooth and cool against my fingers.
I turned it over.
Nothing.
No label.
No writing.
No obvious indication of its purpose.
I put it back down.
Then I thought, *Maybe I should just ask her.*
That thought lasted approximately three seconds.
Then another thought appeared.
*What if it’s something embarrassing?*
And that was enough to make me hesitate.
Looking back, I realize how ridiculous that was.
I wasn’t embarrassed by the object itself. I was embarrassed by the possibility of revealing that I didn’t recognize something my girlfriend apparently knew about.
It was a strange kind of insecurity.
I didn’t want her to think I was clueless.
So instead of asking, I decided to investigate.
That was my first mistake.
I started with the most obvious possibility: maybe it was something from the kitchen.
I took it out of the bathroom and held it next to a few utensils. It didn’t look like anything I had ever used for cooking. It was too small to be a proper utensil, too delicate to be a stirring tool, and too smooth to be something designed for heavy use.
I moved on.
Maybe it was something related to cleaning.
That seemed possible for approximately thirty seconds.
Then I realized that I had absolutely no idea what cleaning tool would require a tiny glass stick.
I searched through a drawer where my girlfriend had left a few personal items during previous visits.
Nothing.
I checked the bathroom cabinet.
Nothing.
Then I opened my phone and typed a vague search into the internet.
I won’t repeat exactly what I searched because, frankly, it was embarrassing.
The search results made everything worse.
Whenever you don’t know what something is, searching for it without knowing the correct terminology can produce some extremely strange answers.
I found photographs of laboratory equipment, beauty tools, household accessories, medical instruments, craft supplies, and things I was certain had nothing to do with my bathroom.
I became even more confused.
At one point, I was sitting on the edge of my bed staring at my phone, thinking, *How can one tiny piece of glass have so many possible explanations?*
Then I remembered something important.
I didn’t actually need to solve the mystery alone.
I could ask my girlfriend.
So I picked up my phone.
I opened our conversation.
I typed:
*”Hey, did you leave something in my bathroom?”*
I stared at the message.
Then I deleted it.
Too vague.
I tried:
*”What was that little glass thing you left here?”*
Deleted.
That sounded suspicious.
I tried again.
*”Random question: what’s the little glass stick in my bathroom for?”*
I read it several times.
It seemed perfectly normal.
Then I became embarrassed all over again.
I put the phone down.
That was when I realized something about myself that I hadn’t really considered before.
Sometimes we make simple things complicated because we’re afraid of looking uninformed.
We think knowing everything makes us appear intelligent.
We forget that being willing to ask questions is often a much better sign of confidence.
Still, I didn’t ask.
Instead, I waited.
Later that afternoon, my girlfriend called.
We talked about our plans for the following weekend, joked about something that had happened the night before, and discussed what we might have for dinner.
Several minutes into the conversation, I almost brought it up.
