On losing it

I travel rather a lot. The Lonely Planet tells me to leave only footprints, and I try. But however many bags with however many pockets I strap to myself, I leave a wealth of articles in my wake. Gadgets, sandwiches, bachelors, spatulas, medicines, names and numbers, photographed faces, souvenir palaces, gemstones, hotpants and pamphlets, they tumble behind me in a possession procession. I am the anti-klepto bride.

What does it mean to lose a possession? Inconvenience, regret, frustration? Yes, probably, and almost certainly. A restored faith in good people? Definitely. Time spent up to your armpits down the back of the sofa, retracing steps and beckoning déjà vus, cancelling virtual details, finding replacements, and marvelling at the superior skills of the right-time, right-place, right-action stranger.

My wallet has remained circulating the Tokyo subway whilst I spent an afternoon above ground amongst sakura, sake, and schoolchildren. I got it back, as full as I’d left it. That’s the Japanese, they say. But then again I’ve left my wallet on a hip-high wall in a Leeds ghetto at pub closing time. I got it back then too.

I once unwittingly dropped a package containing my passport, driving license, chequebook, credit cards, and the directions to the best curry house in all of India. My dad then received a phonecall from a shift-worker letting him know that his daughter’s vital documents were sitting on a mantelpiece in Yorkshire, ready to be picked up. Nothing shifty about strangers in this lucky case.

As a student, I rode in the back of a London cab, pockets bulging with gloves and matches and sweetiess and hankies and headphones displacing my keys onto the car seat next to me. Paid the taximan, tried to get into my flat, found I’d lost my keys, slept on a friend’s floor, the usual drill. The next day, I duly went to the university accommodation office clutching my twenty-five pounds replacement key fee, and joined the queue for the counter. On explaining the relevant episodes of the previous night to the assistant, I felt a tap on my shoulder from the next person waiting in line. A blonde girl wearing chains asked me what my keys looked like. I told her that they were attached to a small plastic strawberry-shaped key-ring. ‘Oh’, she replied blinking, as if she’d just stumbled over a mislaid pair of glasses, ‘here they are’. And pulled out of her pocket my glittering and would-be-expensive roomkeys. ‘I found them in the back of a taxi last night’.

Angels, they lot of them. Thank you.

Things lost happen in chaos. Things found are slower-paced, more reflective and provocative. That wallet, those documents, and those keys were lost to me, but of course found to another. What happened when they discovered objects thrown from another life? An abandoned teddy bear, a woollen glove, a mangled signet ring are all powerful kick-starts for speculation on what on earth led to the loss. Who’d have anticipated the potential trauma a single shoe can cast in the mind of the one who walks by? Shoes should be in pairs! The one left, upturned and saggy, is useless, but then so is the other so smart and shiny, all dressed up and nowhere to go, redundant.

As finders of these things we rarely want to be their keeper, as if value remains unfulfilled until the object reclaims its lonely heart. Empathy of loss might drive us to return to unwilling sender; if you’re a loser, like me, you’re more likely to pursue a reconciliation between things found and their owners. If the object bears no clues as to its proper place, we are most likely to place it back where we found it, hoping that the owner will retrace their steps. If we can find a distinguishing feature on the item that could lead to its other half, our inner detective wipes down its magnifying glass and sets about tracking down the owner, all the while performing complex computations regarding the object’s financial and sentimental value, likelihood of finding the owner, and how well the mission can be accommodated into our schedules. Or perhaps because of deadlines and children and everything else that makes life a full-time job, we stick the book or the locket or whatever the treasure in our pocket to consider when we have more time, and so the lost item remains forever discovered, but never refound, bound for an extended period in hiding. Must return, must return.