"Did I leave X at your place?"

An alarming recent trend has been the rise in the leaving behind of personal possessions when I go places. Lately it has been books- one was lost for good a number of weeks ago, and a whole string of them have gone missing only to turn up later. Losing things is an old habit for me, and one which I kind of thought for a long time that I had gotten better at. In grade school, I went through a lot of jackets, and a whole lot of anonymous kids somewhere were wearing them as I would move on to another one. I still remember wistfully the reversible jacket which was red on one side and, I think, denim on the other. It was gone forever one day when I left the school grounds too excitedly.

There were a lot of things like that. Anything I left home with was susceptible. Being a child, I suppose it was largely things which could be dispensed with. Apart from jackets, it was little action figures and lego parts. There were a lot of school materials that went missing, including writing materials and yet-to-be-turned-in assignments. Sometimes I had a quarter for soft serve ice cream served by the school. Today, I have more things on me at any given time when out of the house, and most of them are valued higher than anything I had as a young boy. My phone alone would amount to more than anything lost in childhood if not for the video game cartridges lost on the bus back from a school trip to California.

In truth, some of those things didn't innocently go missing. The action figure I recall was confiscated during a karate lesson, and never returned. A lego part was left behind when the family moved because I was never sufficiently motivated to recover it from the yard in the final days at the old house (more or less the same fate befell some dvds in Chicago). Other items, including other action figures, a bicycle and the video game cartridges, were all probably stolen. Whatever the agent of separation for any one of the things I had and lost, it seemed as if there were more of them for me than for others. I don't know now if that was true of the losses from that time- perhaps it just felt that way given my natural prioritizing of my own experiences.

I do think that recent losses, including near-misses, have been more numerous for me than for others, unless they conceal theirs. I obviously do not. I don't mean to trumpet mine in service of proclaiming myself an uncommon victim. I'm only saying that part of what I am is so preoccupied with my thoughts and other things not pertaining to the moment that I often lose track of the practical and tangible things in front of me. I don't want to lose those thoughts, but perhaps someday I can find balance so that I don't lose any more books.