“My mom gave it to my dad, and my dad didn’t want it.” This is how I tend to recount the history of my water bottle. But this is my bottle’s story only in the sense that “I was born in a hospital” is mine. This history misses its character, its place in my life—it misses the fact that it makes breathing sounds, violates physical laws, and is likely a conscious entity.

It’s a 25oz S’well bottle with all the paint scratched off, and I never leave home without it. I am a big water guy; I drink it all the time. The hardest part of applying to grad school last fall was the fact that I couldn’t drink water for three hours while taking the Mathematics Subject GRE®. I think it has become a living being recently, but it’s possible that it’s been alive the whole time without me knowing it. I have loved this object even before I noticed its supernatural tendencies. My bottle channels deep and mysterious universal forces which trace my life, all while doing the impossible: doing literally impossible things.

Before this one, I used a glass Victoria College water bottle with a red plastic lid. I have never been affiliated with Victoria College, and I also am not the kind of person who should have a glass water bottle. I used my previous water bottle because Kate gave it to me, and it was a very beautiful water bottle. When I eventually broke the red lid was when many things seemed to shift all at once. (It was a surprise to everyone that I only cracked the plastic lid rather than shattering the entire bottle. Sometimes I think this old water bottle intentionally protected itself from this fate. I still have it in my closet.),I was starting to think about my last year of university and applying to grad school, I was no longer seeing Kate, and now I had to find a new water bottle. This is when my aforementioned mom gave a new S’well bottle to my aforementioned dad and he didn’t want it. I was next in the chain of succession for water bottles in the family.

I speak so whimsically about the ways in which my bottle seems to transcend the physical world, and yet the physicality of my bottle is intrinsically linked to the way I understand its ethereal power. It was originally a brown bottle with a painted-on pattern that looked like wood. As fall came and I entered my final year of school, the teakwood finish was chipping off. The bottle had been with me during lonely days (days when I was haunted by bittersweet memories of times when I still used the glass bottle), it had been with me during all my exams, and it was still with me then, except for a few chips of paint. As the school year started, I bathed my bottle in warm water and peeled the paint off, leaving only the shining silver metal beneath it (see photo). It truly was like skinning a peach. It felt like a new beginning. This was the first time I assigned significant meaning to the bottle, identifying my own life’s events with changes in the bottle’s physical self.

The process of applying for graduate school was something into which I put a lot of time, energy, and emotion. One night, during this period, I dropped my water bottle onto my kitchen floor, and when I picked it back up, it had a huge dent in its side. I pushed at it from every angle on the inside, and couldn’t fix it. This made me deeply sad. I had identified so strongly with the water bottle, and thought of it as so meaningful, and I had no idea what the dent would mean for my own life. I felt the dent, for the days and weeks before and after it happened.

When applications were done, and a stressful and busy period had given way to a period of sustained waiting, my bottle began to make breathing sounds. By this, I mean that I began to hear rhythmic inhaling and exhaling coming from my water bottle from time to time. This still happens every day. I don’t know why or how this happens, and the only explanation which I am willing to accept is that my water bottle is a living being. Then I got into grad school. I exhaled, too, with a sigh of relief. The climate of my brain improved significantly after this point—I was less stressed, and living better and more fully, more certain about my future and my place in the world.

One morning during this period of emotional sunrise, I woke up and picked up my water bottle, searching with my thumb for the dent on its side. As if breathing wasn’t enough proof of my water bottle’s supernatural power, it had done the physically impossible. The two-inch crater I had been so upset about a couple months earlier was gone. My water bottle had healed itself without a trace. Just as the dent in my water bottle had reverberated through time and space as an emotional dent in my life, the emotional healing in my life had manifested through the impossible physical healing of a big metal dent.

The objects that surround and accompany us as life unfolds must not be forgotten as part of the universe’s interconnectedness. My water bottle reminds me that beauty and mystery lie not only in complex systems, but in its simple ones, too. I believe that the significance which I choose to assign to my water bottle is just as rich and materially powerful as the significance one could assign to any other concept. The only way I can understand consciousness itself is as a cosmic sense of meaning expressing itself through a physical vessel; our human consciousness is so obviously an example of consciousness simply because we are lucky enough to have sufficiently complex machines through which this sense of meaning can be expressed.

I feel grateful to have gotten to know my water bottle well enough to understand it as conscious and to recognize its power over the universe in relation to mine. It’s getting kind of leaky though.