LOST: definition - no longer possessed or retained; no longer to be found; having gone astray or missed the way; bewildered as to place or direction
Who hasn’t put their keys down and then spent a good deal of time looking for them, reasoning that they are lost? Who isn’t partnered with someone who can never find their glasses despite having several pairs? Which of us hasn’t driven into a friend’s neighbourhood and taken a wrong turn and had to ring them to say they were lost in the wilds of suburbia?
We all have or have been the lost thing. The minor annoyances that consume time and effort to find. But some lost things simply move into the realm of memory. They are not recoverable; they remain unfound. And bewilderingly mysterious, frustrating and inevitably painful.
I spent a good many years of my adult life, as I moved from place to place, wondering where the things of my childhood had disappeared to. Similarly, I wonder about some significant items of my youth…where are my Slade records and T-Rex posters? Surely, I could not have been that careless to have abandoned them. What about those amazing green platform sole shoes I thought were gorgeous!!? Or my most prized poetry journal and autograph book (signatures of Bon Scott, Daryl Braithwaite and Skyhooks band members). (For young readers, do some research!)
I often contemplate the difference between deliberate loss where we discard the remnants of past existences and the more painful accidental loss of something we had cherished. Both those things eventually become vague recollections, sepia versions of what they were, faded almost as if the memories have slipped from the pages on which I’d written them. These things that once meant so much just evaporate. And perhaps they congregate. Like the lost socks of every household have somehow formed a society within another dimension. The trinkets of our individual pasts have clumped together to form an entirely different entity. The books we are sure we saved have joined a universal library of ideas. It’s fanciful but offers some kind of explanation for their disappearance.
Then there are the things we place for safekeeping. So safe we can never find them again. Probably tucked into those pesky socks that just evacuated with our secrets. Little things that roll themselves into impossible hiding spots only to be recovered in some millennia far away. Keys that are essential for opening everything placed so deliberately in a box to ensure they can’t be lost. Only to lose the box or fail to remember where one stowed it. The little lost things…they frazzle the mind.
When I was a child (around the time of Noah and the Ark) I lost my cat Patches. When I say lost, I thought he had wandered into the wilderness of my neighbourhood and could not find his way back. I suspected nothing so nefarious as cat-knapping or him suffering a mortal injury. I believed he was lost in the true definition of the word. The weeks and months of searching for him on the way to and from school and weekend sorties into the bush around our suburb are clear memories. To have had him and then for him to disappear was unimaginably terrible. I would stand at the front gate hoping he’d reappear; possibly bloody-pawed but through an indomitable spirit of cat courage we would reunite. (Disney and Lassie have an awful lot to answer for my childhood hopefulness) Patches did not reappear. I suspect a plucky band of underworld cat thieves on-sold him for an enormous profit!
The other lost things prove more complicated. They are bigger than kittens and tangible things. The loss of a friendship that can’t weather a storm, hurts to the core. When death comes, the loss is an upheaval and leaves us wounded. The illness that steals in and takes the living memories from a brain and leaves the person here, but not here, makes us weep at the injustice. The losses in war, the destruction of an environmental wonder, the eradication of an entire culture are the lost things that are immeasurable. And they remain lost to us. There is no quaint repository for lost things of this magnitude. There is no imagined world for them. We just must accept the lost thing as part of the past, no matter how achingly painful.
Our lost things are part of our stories as much as the things that remain. Perhaps it is the losses of all sizes and shapes that teach us how to value life. Perhaps the lost things make room for the new things, the new life, the change and growth. I suspect there will be many more lost things that will join the long list I already have…that book I just can’t find, the half scribbled story idea in a journal somewhere, the photo taken long ago, the ring I bought at a market in Cypress, my red suede boots bought on my first trip to Italy, the belt buckle of my mother’s wedding dress, the letter my father wrote when our children were born….and other things significant and not so important. The litany of losses is perhaps just a reminder of the life we have lived, the joys we experienced, the reminder of who we once were and who we have become.
And of course, the eternal search for the lost key and the reading glasses will continue.
Well written of course Tracey! May your gift never be lost!
Cheers
John