Did I Lose That?
A sacred stillness hangs over the Attic of Lost Things like a long-untouched window drape in an abandoned home just before it's billowed wide. Dust particles twirling slowly in a single shaft of hazy sunlight are the only visible movement in the room. There is not a sound. The dust particles ask, "What happens if you pull the drape?"
My eyes close. My chest tightens. Memories flash in sharp, noisy, vivid color beneath my closed eyelids. A deep breath fills my lungs and is released in a slow exhalation through my nose. It's time.
I slide my hand into the chest on the floor before me, and close my fingers around something soft. It wriggles, and my yelp shatters the stillness.
"Misty!" The kitten blinks at me, then begins to squirm. "Oh, Misty!" Surprise has drawn tears to my eyes. "Oh, baby girl. Baby. Where did you go?" I hug the tiny creature against my chest and bury my face in her velvety body, relishing the feel of her soft fur against my skin. "Oh, Misty. I'm so so sorry I couldn't find you. I couldn't -- " My voice cracks. "I couldn't take care of you." I hang on to the kitten like she is a tiny buoy as I cry, and she peers up at me, expressionless, watching, her ears twitching thoughtfully every few moments as though I am a puzzle she is trying to solve.
Misty continues to watch me, head cocked slightly to the side, as I bury my hand in the chest time after time, drawing things I have lost into the light one after another.
A white and pink conch shell, still glittering with sand crystals.
A smooth grayish stone from my first time at the ocean -- had it fallen out of my pocket? I turn it over and over in my palm, reliving that day's salt-watered awe, the crashing of laughter into waves into a golden sky.
A railway card, its plastic laminate peeling on the corners.
A three-inch-tall doll with a blonde ponytail and a pink sleeveless dress -- Stacy.
Too many dried flowers to count, some tied in bunches with bits of dried reed.
Books -- so many books. Well-loved books with dog-eared pages and faded covers.
Glasses, two pairs of them. I shudder, remembering classrooms and sweaty underarms and panic -- how would I see the board? How would I write down the sight words? How would I tell my mom? Would I get another pair?
My old cell phone -- my jaw drops. Over a year's worth of lovingly snapped photos, a video of my niece saying "I wub you" again and again, voice memos of song drafts, many spontaneously recorded against backgrounds of birdsongs, traffic, or the hiss of a coffee pot, some hardly decipherable because of the tears choking out my voice, and so so many text messages, miles and miles of kind words, meaningful connections, encouraging paragraphs, that I had wished I'd engraved into my mind.
Several pieces of paper with notes scrawled across them -- I pause on one that says, "Don't forget to smile, Darling." I stare at it so long it begins to blur, and then two teardrops fall onto it, and I watch the 'D' and the 'n' in 'Darling' expand and slant. "No!" I cry, yanking it out from beneath my face, dabbing at the droplets with the tip of my finger. "No, no, no." Frustration roils up in me. "Crap, crap, crap. Please. Don't go away. Don't. Don't go." Am I talking to the words on the page? Or to a set of broad shoulders, a hand in my hair, a deep laugh that had cracked open my loneliness? Hurriedly, with shaking hands, I fold the paper back down its original crease.
A Camelbak water bottle, dirt clinging to the sides of it.
A pair of jeans, a handful of earrings, a silver anklet, a wrinkled-up plane ticket.
A red Valentine, a metal spoon, a postcard, a wad of cash, makeup brushes.
Where is it? I am no longer fingering every object, not giving myself enough time to sink into the memories. Why can't I find it?
Eventually the chest has been emptied. Around me on the floor lay all my lost things, the array of a life full and oftentimes careless and yet... it isn't here.
Where is my Trust? I scramble to my feet, peer behind the chest to see if there is another hiding elsewhere in the room, stoop to rummage through my lost things once again, and finally straighten with hands on my hips and let out a huff.
Shouldn't it be here? I wanted to see Trust. I wanted to touch it, to hold it up to the single shaft of light and memorize it, to savor it and breathe it, to try to remember what it felt like and when and how it was lost. Lips pursed, I stand quiet in deep thought, looking carefully down over the spread of lost things.
Finally, "Ah." I whisper into the still room. "I see." My shells, my toys, my notes... all these things I had lost myself.
None had been stolen from me.