loss

I’m finding starting again a challenge, so I went back to the writer’s block prompts.

"What have you lost?"

I know what kind of post is supposed to come from a prompt like that. Tales of regret, of aching, of an emptiness that’s bittersweet because you know that really, things are better now. People who drifted away, dreams that couldn’t survive a lifestyle change. Loss of innocence, loss of optimism, loss of naïveté, loss of the old self while trying to discover a new one.

What came to my mind instead was, "I can never remember where I put anything."

I lose earrings. I lose paperwork. I lose cables. I lose socks. I lose books. I lose memory cards. I have bought Abre los Ojos on DVD four times, and each time I’ve managed to lose it before I’ve been able to watch it. Once I lost a printer. It was in my room for six months and I couldn’t find it. I say once; I’ve lost that printer twice. In the same room. Eventually I just gave up and got rid of it.

It’s the kind of problem I really don’t know how to correct. My memory for things that aren’t "what did I do with that T-shirt?" is so good that it’s actually a huge pain in the neck. I can’t just put things back in the same place every time because I usually lose things before they get a place. Or, sometimes, I put the thing back in its place, and when I return to the place the thing is no longer in it. The thing then turns up somewhere entirely logical, like inside a flowerpot or attached to the underside of a curtain or wrapped in an empty chocolate wrapper and shoved between the oven and the washing machine. I don’t have the techniques to fight this kind of Possession Gremlin.

On the other hand, sometimes I find things. When I moved house, I found two books I hadn’t read, an unopened bottle of truffle oil, three eyeliners, a Czech phrase book, a raspberry beret and a swizzle stick with a watermelon on it. I’m not saying all this is quality stuff. Some of it is the exact opposite of quality. But since I’m clearly stuck being the person that loses everything, I may as well take a small amount of joy in regarding my bedroom as a really shit treasure hunt. Ill-fitting camera lens filters! Fridge magnets shaped like aubergines! Every colour of Revlon Lip Butter in the world (literally. I went to California and bought all the ones they don’t sell here)! A golf tee, for some inexplicable reason! Half a bag of Viennese truffles!

So there are worse problems I could have. But still rather a pain in the bum.