I remember when I was very little, a friend had given me a Snake-Eyes GI Joe figure. He was my favorite character and I was very excited to have one of my own. That night I was taking a bath and playing with my new guy when my mom came in and said that another friend of mine, we'll call him "Tom", was outside and wanted to know if he could borrow a toy to play with. I wasn't super close with Tom and he tended to move a lot so it was hard to say when I'd see him again. So I decided to let him borrow one of my other figures. A few minutes later my mom came back and said that Tom had asked specifically for Snake-Eyes. To this day I wish I could go back and tell the younger version of me that he shouldn't loan out his favorite toy, but that's not how it works. So being a young idiot, I gave my favorite toy to my mom to give to Tom to borrow. That was the last time I ever saw that toy. The next time I saw Tom I asked where my Snake-Eyes was and he said he lost it, which I knew was a lie, but I didn't really have a whole lot of power to do anything about it. It's been thirty years and it still haunts me a little bit (obviously). Now I know that in the grand scheme of my life that little action figure wasn't a big deal. To my childhood self though it was a hard lesson in trust and loss of that trust. It changed the way I looked at Tom too because now I realized that he wouldn't hesitate to take away something valuable to me.
Being a little kid you lose things all the time. Most of the time it was my own fault for putting something down and forgetting where it was. Sometimes I imagine all the toys and knickknacks that must be scattered around my dad's property. Of course there is the possibility that they've simply blinked out of existence or have been consumed by the world somehow. Maybe in a thousand years someone will dig up all those lost things and start to piece together a story about my life based on the things I had when I was young.
We all lose things. If you think about it, most people have probably lost more things than they currently have. It's a strange thing though to have something simply vanish from your world without a trace. I've joked before that I wish I could have Google Life. I could call out and say "Google where is that necklace we've been looking for?" and Google would respond with "It's behind the refrigerator. It has been there for 2.3 weeks". It seems like there should only be a finite number of places something should logically be, but as we all know when we do manage to recover lost things, that they tend to be in what seems like random locations. Finding the television remote in the pantry with the plates. That black shirt you like in a completely different closet. A pair of glasses in the trunk of your car. It makes one wonder what was going on at the precise moment when an object became lost to us.
Strangely enough though I find myself being a fairly good finder of things. This is especially true around the house when asked if we have something, usually a tool of some kind, and my weird little mind suddenly recalls the possibility of a square bit for a drill sitting on a shelf in the shed. Sure enough it's there. The how and why my brain can sporadically remember the location of random items has never been quite clear. It's almost as though some part of my mind saw the item and thought that it was important enough to note for later. Meanwhile the thing I know we have, but isn't in the location where it should be, draws a complete blank. That's kind of the blessing and curse of living with someone though. You have a second person that may be able to find something you've misplaced. On the flip side though you can never be sure if that other person isn't the cause of something going missing in the first place. There is always that shadow of doubt. Did you really lose your favorite t-shirt or was lost on purpose when you weren't looking?
