Loss seems an apt topic after dropping our third intramural game in a row. At least we haven’t lost our dignity yet, right guys?
Losing games, losing notebooks, losing patience, losing time. I’ve lost hair, stamina, agility. I lost a cousin to heroin (he called my parents at three in the morning when he realized he had lost control).
“Hello? Hello?” my father said before he lost the connection.
I thought I lost a phone in a cab once and bought a new one right before I found the old one in a coat pocket. So I didn’t lost all the numbers inside. I almost lost a notebook in France, but I ran back to the Louvre and my friend Liz retrieved it from the lost and found. There was a yellow sticky note in it that said trouvé (found)—but I realized that it could have as easily said perdu (lost).
I lost money in a poker game at my boss’ house once, just as I was winning. I have lost far many more sporting contests than I have won.
I lost a notebook for real on an Amtrak train on the day after Election Day in 2008. I bought a notebook and wrote about the notebook that I lost and fretted that “I didn’t really care about writing after all if I could lose a notebook so easily.” But then I lost that notebook in a seat-back pocket on an airplane bound for Chicago. I changed my perspective and figured that I lost them because they needed to go somewhere else. I imagine someone else finding them. They could find me so easily these days. There aren’t too many of my name on Google. Try it. I have.
I have lost so much time thinking about loss and about lost objects. About getting robbed and having most of the objects that I inherited from my grandfather and one that I inherited from my father. In a notebook that I didn’t lose, I wrote about objects not really mattering. About our emotional connection to them being sufficient enough.
But I lost my patience for that argument and didn’t get over getting robbed until I realized how to just be upset about it and move on.
I have lost so many friends, it makes me ill. I have gotten a few back, and those that I have, I try not to take for granted. I lose touch too often, and so, I lose out.
I have lost control. I have lost my mind in spurts, measured out in weeks lost trying to claw my way back to fitness or mental health. I lose ideas when I think I’ve got them in my grasp.
I have lost confidence in writing—lost hundreds of pages to Word farts and late-night self-righteous deletions. I have lost confidence in charisma, in politics, in ideology. I lose my hold on metaphor, on synecdoche, lose the imperative to show, not tell. I lose my train of thought and think that I might be losing some of the pigment under my eyes with thinking and reading.
Objects, people, ideas, feelings—I totally lose my ability to stay away from clichés when I try to round out a point. I lose and then lose something else, and before I know it, the loss scabs over, turns into new loss, prefigures presences, rebuilds.
