Lost and found

THE SHEEPISH RETURN
Act I, Scene I.
Setting: Desk. Chair. Computer. Writer (ME) in mid-40s, hunched, hair frizzing to high heaven. Lights up on ME typing on BLOG.

ME: Hey, Blog. ‘Sup?
BLOG: New phone. Who dis?
ME: Come on, baby. Don’t be like that.
BLOG: Don’t ‘baby’ me. You’re the one who hasn’t come by in six months.
ME: Please, I’m sorry, I can explain.
BLOG: Six months, and all I get are comma splices. Wow.
ME: No, I missed you–
BLOG. (Snorts) If it were the ’90s and I had a hand, I’d tell you to talk to it.
End scene.

Okay, okay, okay. I’ve been away. I have excuses, none of which are particularly scintillating. Finishing draft + new job + travel + househunt hell + general existential angst = blog neglect. I’ve never professed to be good at this (and by this, I mean blog/social media/communicating with humans). But I also have missed my ramblings, this strange private-public sphere that lets me barf up my mushy writing-life hairballs in the ill-lit hallways of the interwebs. (Reminder: Wear shoes around here, people.)

Chapter XIVVLQ of Bryn’s writing life: No Writing Is Happening (subtitle: I Don’t Understand Roman Numerals). The fiction writing is on pause right now, primarily because I’m wrapping up the semester but also because I’ve stumbled into a bit of a creative dead space. Finished a big draft three months back (good) but have been foundering since, poking at one beached jellyfish of a story for three months with no end in sight (blerg). To mix my metaphor further, basically I cleaned the creative cupboards right the hell out. Didn’t even leave myself a dusty ol’ can of Spam.

The truth is, as I cried to my BFF the other day, I’m feeling somewhat lost, creatively, humanly. That nagging sensation of going in circles, of uncertainty, of being untethered. There are real-life capital-R Reasons, no question, but as BFF reminded me as she talked me off the ledge (again!), this feeling is also capital-N NORMAL in the writing life. We’re always kinda lost as we write, wandering around the spongy, shifting tundra of a story, in the erratic unknown of  the imagination.

This led me to thinking about the Lost and Found — as in a place, or rather, usually a box. In my mishmash of a memory, I have two bins: one at my hometown community pool, where I worked as a lifeguard, and one at the college bar where I worked as a waitress and bartender. What a collection of weirdness in those boxes: smelly damp towels, neon goggles, a lone flipper, broken necklaces, single earrings, sunglasses with loose lenses, left-handed glove, jackets that smelled of cigarettes and sweat and with wadded wrappers in their pockets. The flotsam and jetsam of sun-drunk children and drunk-drunk adults.

As a writer, of course I’m fascinated by such objects: all those potential stories tangled in one stinky box crammed in the bowels of the break room. To whom do these items belong? Who’s missing them? A popular writing exercise is to imagine the drawers and pockets of a character and then to write the story of one of the objects discovered there. Objects accrue meaning. Things can do story-work. And good grief, what heightened emotional stakes in those words, the Lost and Found. To be lost. But, oh, to be found.

But today, as I squirm around at my desk with my dulled mind and rusty fingers, I am most fascinated by the nomenclature: The Lost and Found. Not Lost or Found. And. Small distinction, big effect. An object can be both lost and found at the same time. Not opposite, but circular, entwined.

Time and again, the act of writing is my own Lost and Found. In writing, I am both missing and present, confused and precise, insecure and safe, stumbling and stumbling upon.

If I extend this circularity to myself, to my metaphoric sense of being lost, does this mean I also can be found at the same time?

Well, duh.

Takes me writing to remember it.