Saturday Afternoon

The Last Charging Cable
I keep one in the drawer by my bed, coiled neatly like a habit I can’t quite break. A charging cable. Black, frayed near one end, the plastic split just enough that you can see the silver threading underneath tiny veins carrying power from the wall into my phone, into my life. Every night, I plug it in.
It’s a small ritual. I reach behind the nightstand without looking, find the outlet by memory, and wait for the faint vibration that tells me I’m tethered again. Charging. Safe. Connected.
But lately, I’ve been thinking about how strange this object really is.
In twenty years, I imagine someone finding it in a box labeled miscellaneous right next to old photos and expired passports. They’ll turn it over in their hands, confused. Why would anyone need a physical cord just to stay alive in the world?
Back when I first got it, charging cables were everywhere. Cars, airports, coffee shops, each one offering a lifeline dangling from the wall. You could tell how anxious a room was by how many people were crouched near outlets, guarding their cables like precious heirlooms.
We planned our days around battery percentages.
Low power mode meant low patience. A dying phone could ruin a date, a job interview, or a long drive home. We panicked over red icons the way people once panicked over empty gas tanks. This cable knew all of that.
It’s been yanked from walls in a hurry, bent at odd angles in hotel rooms, and loaned to strangers who promised to bring it back. It’s charged phones during late-night arguments, tearful goodbyes, celebratory texts, and endless scrolling when sleep wouldn’t come.
It was there when I waited for news that changed everything. It was there when nothing changed at all.
But now I read articles about seamless power ambient charging fields, bio-integrated batteries, devices that sip energy from the air like plants turning sunlight into food. No more cords. No more outlets. No more hunting for a plug while your life drains away at 3% remaining. In twenty years, power will just be.
Children will laugh at the idea that we once had to sit still, trapped by a wire. We measured freedom in feet of cable. That we carried backups for our backups because we were terrified of being unreachable.
And yet, I think something will be lost when this cable disappears. There was a kind of honesty in it.
You had to stop what you were doing and connect. You had to admit you were running low. You had to pause, wait, rest at least for a moment while energy flowed back into you.
When my phone is fully charged, I unplug the cable and set it back in the drawer. It rests there quietly, patient, like it knows its time is limited. One day, I won’t need it anymore. But tonight, I still do.
And if I reach for it in the dark, if it hums softly with purpose, this small, obsolete-to-be thing reminds me of a time when staying powered meant slowing down long enough to plug in.