My friend Lena has this odd little habit—she keeps a souvenir from every date she goes on. I’m not talking about movie stubs or pressed flowers (although she’s got plenty of those, too). I mean everything. A half-melted birthday candle from a guy who took her to a bakery. A torn piece of a cocktail napkin with a doodle on it. Once, she even kept a toothpick from a sushi place because the guy used it to dramatically poke at his sashimi while confessing his love for conspiracy theories.

But the strangest souvenir? That has to be the pigeon feather.

She went on this date with a guy named Theo who was super into urban bird watching—apparently that’s a thing? They met up at a park downtown, and about ten minutes into the date, a pigeon crash-landed in front of them, flapping like it had something to prove. Theo claimed it was a “sign of fortune,” which Lena said sounded suspiciously made up, but she went along with it. The pigeon then strutted toward their bench like it wanted to join the conversation, fluffed its wings dramatically, and left a single gray feather behind before waddling away like a diva.

Theo picked up the feather and handed it to her like it was a rose. Lena, of course, kept it.

Now it lives in a glass jar on her bookshelf, labeled in neat black ink: “Theo – The Pigeon Whisperer.”

She insists it brings good luck. I say it brings weird energy.

But that’s Lena—part hopeless romantic, part chaos collector.