I hadn’t even noticed I’d lost it.
Leaning over the handlebars of my bike, I pick up the little yellow festival bracelet that had been my ticket to Sa Terza last summer. I loved the golden design of the fabric and had slipped it over my wrists and onto my keychain to keep as a fond memory, tucked away on a daily basis in my coat pockets.
Here it was now, a little dirty and roughed up, lying on the ground in front of the building where I unlock my keys for work. We use transponders, and each morning, I take the carabiner with all of my keys out of my pocket, and beep in.
Only at the sight of the bracelet on the ground did I realize how long it must have been lying there. How long I hadn’t noticed it was gone.
“But I’m really happy to have found it again!” I tell Denis later that night. “I mean, it just brings so many fond memories back…” I trail off. “Finding it is kinda like seeing a friend again, who in the whirlwind of life you’d once seen, but then, somehow… they slipped your mind once too often. And you lose touch, and accidentally, in the whirlwind of it all… forget. Forget what it was like to have them around. And then you see them again, out of nowhere and unexpectedly and you can just be happy to have found them again – without ever really having had to be sad at losing them. I guess that’s the best way to lose something. Without ever noticing.”
As we all sit in our own little quarantine chambers, it’s not hard to drift apart, to forget. And as we do, even if we lose each other perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, I hope that you don’t forget the love there was, and the love there is.
We’ll find each other again at some point.