guff

Misplaced Horizon

So far, and by that I mean up to this point in my life, I’ve permanently misplaced a good quantity of stuff. Some of these things were still of use at the time they disappeared, though not all that important in the greater scheme of… things. In that category can be filed a math notebook I had back in sixth grade, a music CD I don’t recall listening to very often (or at all), and my last car.

Occasionally, there was some small intent on my part to actually throw away a particular item. However, one facet of my intrinsic nature in collecting stuff borders on what a squirrel considers overly obsessive, and I realized long ago the best way to get rid of whatever I have no further interest retaining ownership of is to arrange its loss. Sounds a little cracked, but there’s nothing like completely mislaying a pile of old bills or pants worn at the crotch to make you forget they ever had a place at the bottom of your closet.

If I took account of all the stuff I’ve lost through the years, it might add up to something less than the average for my time and place, though for me the total is plenty enough. Still, I can’t recall more than a dozen objects which losing caused some major, lasting consequence to me — unlike the car. As I mentioned, much was past its usefulness long before it was dropped by the wayside. But there’s the odd physical bit of personal paraphernalia which falls square in the middle of the indispensable scale, and I’d really like to get these back.

(Anything found higher on that scale was replaced, so no reason to dwell on those.)

One is a book. A simple thing you’d think would be fairly easy to replace, but I’m not talking about the manufactured article here. I can always purchase another edition of the work itself (and have). What I mean is I lost that book, and not just any copy. The book itself left back there somewhere holds the significance, not the title. It was a first edition, and that’s part of the attraction in regaining it, but it engenders more meaning than a hundred limited prints could ever make up for. What was so important about that book? Nothing that I can clarify in words. Rather it’s a dull, periodically recurring ache from some nearly forgotten incident. But the ache is there. It never truly goes away, no matter how many more books I buy.

Another is a beat up manila folder “lost” twenty years back. Actually, someone else threw it out, but I won’t mention names… The folder itself was insignificant, but it was filled with scraps and outlines for several ideas (stories and such) I was working on at the time. Little in it would have been good (I’ve read my writing from that time, so trust me here), and whatever held a serious importance to me I’ve long since reconstructed. But I’d still like to have that folder returned to my possession.

I’ve lived a life trying to avoid an attachment to stuff. It’s a Zen thing, but in many ways it’s a Kafkaesquí thing as well. But my interest in reclaiming some of the stuff I’ve lost is not an issue of attachment, not really. To me it’s more like how it must feel when a child of your own strikes out to claim its independence long before you’re assured it can survive on its own. Without that assurance, it’s hard to cope with it being out there all on its own.

All right, and I admit it — there’s some attachment involved this as well. I really have to lose that part of me.