Lost

& found & found.

The thing was lost. It had everything inside. My butterflies, my bees. The voices of my friends, directions, sunsets, rainbows, irritations — everything. It had rides and numbers for passage. Transactions. It contained seven contact numbers for one dead person and one number with an Iowa area code. At some point in life I saved this number as SOMEONE and have no idea now who SOMEONE is. Iowa, will I ever get the nerve to call?

Not today, the thing is lost. Today I tore up the house. My family realized it was sorta dire and helped me trace and think. To turn over my brain, we employed an oblique strategy: “Tape your mouth.” Fun, but didn’t help. We removed how I move and eyed where I tend to drip my things. I was shown a failing side of myself and then blindfolded, spun, set in the garden to restart. Finally, we upset the basement where we keep the past, the gym, and a bag of dried peanuts for the unicorn. The unicorn is on loan to our neighbor — I have 547 pics of the unicorn in my thing.

The thing is, I wanted to lose it, so it was lost. Bird in my hand, my pocket, my eye, and the fantasy of it slipping into the ocean, the lake, a novel by SOMEONE ELSE.

In the meantime I found other things I had missed. Garden yarn — now I can tie the tomato and tomatillo plants back to their masts! Everything will be rigged tomorrow; the rigging means to hold. But the rain is raining again. Summer of rain.

Tell me, where did you find something that was lost?