I have tried to avoid use of the royal “I” in writing words on paper or on screen. Like use of the verb “to be” it seems like a weakness — resorting to what I think or what specific circumstances I experienced — when the greater story is what happened outside, or at best because of me. It is an adjunct of my social belief that good listeners make the best conversation.

Lately, in the privacy of my head, I have taken this elimination of I to another level by removing the trap of my from accounts of things which seem to belong to me but are ephemeral. I started at this some months ago after a mundane conversation about a grocery store coupon. An older woman commented “I took my coupon to the WalMart…” Her use of “my” stuck out like a thorn. Your coupon? You earned it? Do you enter a WalMart, coupon in hand, with such pride in that scrap of paper that you claim it is yours?

The physical coupon itself, that sacrificial interstitial vehicle of commerce that you clipped from a newspaper or printed off a web page is not really yours. It is not WalMart’s. At best it belongs to the manufacturer. If the responsibility of a human being for an item’s existence is the standard of ownership then I expect the real owner of this “woman’s” coupon could be traced to a marketing manager somewhere in the company that produces the product(s) on the coupon. The coupons function as reconnaissance vessels, and while they pass through the fingers and hands of individual consumers and cashiers I think it unclear whether a coupon ever becomes the property of anyone along the way.

This philosophical point has likely been addressed elsewhere, but I invoke the dilemma of ownership as an example of a petty weakness in human communication. I own nothing on this earth, even the flesh on these bones will one day be stripped bare, but like most humans I find myself describing “my” this and “my” that in reference to objects and passings that only slip through my fingers like sand.

Between sentences here I stop to sip my coffee. My coffee? What makes it mine? Is it because you don’t have it? I could simplify the account by saying “I sip coffee”, or we could disembody it to a universality by saying “Coffee is sipped.” By my standards of the moment I think that a satisfactory account of consuming this coffee must eliminate ownership of the product. This coffee is like that grocery store coupon: an interstitial material presence no more mine than yours, which belongs to me no more than the water I drank from a public water fountain yesterday.

And yet at coffee shops and diners I will hear myself refer to “my coffee” or “my sandwich” as I come to believe that this contradistinction of possessiveness is false. Nothing is owned. Nothing is mine. Nothing is yours. I even find myself turning back the notion of my thoughts. “My” ideas are not mine but a composite mash of surrounding concepts, regurgitated back into the pool of thought. Nothing germinates in a genuinely cloistered space that is solely mine, or solely yours.