Material things become artifacts through disuse affected by the shifting of time and space.

A computer, at once a home, a safe place, goes black.  Dust settles, it is just a box.  Maybe even a piece of junk.

A name-tag, one day so critical for recognition and entry, immediately loses its import at the bottom of a purse.  No longer needed or appropriate since the symbology is now irrelevant.

A cell phone, defunct of batteries, becomes a toy or annoyance.  A reminder that something invested with such necessity is really only a luxury.

This blog, if I were to stop writing it, would occupy a small space of internet history, eventually, and promptly repetitious.  The contents overexposed, all the illusions and protections implicitly built into language open for even undiscerning eyes to lay revealed.  If I were to erase it, it would be extinguished.  Entirely dispersed and present only through its ties to the ideas it was drawn from.

A practice, if it is undone, certainly becomes a past.

Perhaps, there are two exceptions:  

1. The hug my child shares with me.  
2. Artistic materializations of lasting impact.