Lost
My bag was stolen tonight. As stupid as it comes: I was at the fair, sitting at a table with some friends, I was up dancing, a kid came to sell them shit, they didn’t pay attention, my bag was gone.
The things that are inconvenient, and irritating, and expensive…but don’t really matter:
- My mobile phone, my new sim card, and about 100 pesos credit.
- My wallet, and in my wallet: some money, my debit card, some Metro tickets, my work ID card, probably some other cards I can’t even remember, scraps of paper with phone numbers on.
- My keys: including the keys to my apartment, my office, the womens’ group house on campus, a locker I don’t use, the house of the person whose dog I am supposed to be walking this weekend, and the house of the person whose plants I am watering while he is away for work.
- My digital camera.
The things that do matter:
- The pictures that were in my phone: the overgrown vegetable patch in my garden at home, with foxgloves, apple trees, and chairs stacked against the greenhouse; a rainbow over the allotments; my favourite picture of myself, sitting in a tree by the river in Cambridge, happy; the ‘Earth from the Air’ outdoor exhibition in Leeds; the sky over the city; the city at night.
- In my wallet: my corazon, a Mexican talisman in the shape of a heart with a particular importance for me; a squashed penny saying ‘I love you’, which I have carried around for years out of a strange superstition, even though the love is long since over.
- On my keys: the one from the Tate I bought on a school trip for art GCSE; the leather Parker keyring that my Dad bought me for a joke (I’d said who on EARTH would pay extra for a pen just for a stupid Parker keyring, and look what Santa brought me…), and which I have always carried as a momento of him and that silliness, whose texture and fit in the hand somehow comforts and cheers me; the friendship bracelet that has been wrapped around my keys, gone everywhere with me, since I was 14, and my friend Liz made us all one for our first DofE expedition.
- The pictures in my camera: I don’t even remember what these were of. I don't want to think about it.
- Buster, the little bat who has been attached to my bag since my very, very dear friend Fiend gave him to me.
- My little red bag itself, which has been many places with me, and which I was very fond of, which was a little part of me.
- A tiny book, which I had with me at Wychwood last year, my first festival, when I was working for Friends of the Earth, and where I wrote down all the things that excited and amazed me, all my impressions and feelings and thoughts, and which I’d never got round to taking out of my bag.
I know they’re only things. But tonight, I'm broken-hearted.
posted by Eloise @ 2:22 am
3 comments
3 Comments:
Oh E I'm so sorry. That completely sucks. *hugehug*. Had my wallet stolen as you know a few years ago and it's just awful.
On a related note, Mum and I parked on K's P, came back a few hours later to find the car had gone. The street was virtually empty, looked up and down, no car. The car had my bag with phone, wallet and various items in it as well - cue me bursting into tears.
Mum called the police and was in the middle of giving details when I pootled down to a shop that I had to return something to, only to see a very familar shape in the second disabled bay on K's P. Yes. We'd looked in the wrong bay and had overlooked the one 50m further down the street.
Oh the shame.
*morehugs*
Oh, I know how absolutely sickening it is to lose things that you are attached to. I always feel that I shouldn't mind, because it's only stuff, but it's so depressing to lose sentimental things you can't replace. I'm definately not very good at that - much sympathy to you. I realised how attached I was to a small ring I've been wearing for years when it got damaged at the weekend.
My beloved had an £1000 bike stolen as he slept next to it, that he'd had for years, been all over Europe on, and has never been able to afford to replace (now years later), and apparently at the time sighed and said "well, it's gone now". He is not human!
Thanks for the sympathy. I ’preciate it. That’s the thing about things that go with you or that you use all the time—you get very attached to them, but by their nature they’re the things you’re most likely to lose.
I’m still royally pissed off about it – realising how much it’s going to cost to replace everything (bag, wallet, phonecard, phone, sim card – it all adds up) is just adding insult to injury. But, in perspective, I feel a bit ashamed of the fuss I made too—it could be a lot worse.
G, you told me that story when we spoke on skype a while ago… but obviously the trauma is still burning… I hope you’ve mostly got over the shame by now! I was perpetually doing the same thing with bikes—reason #347 why I shouldn’t be trusted with a car :)
L, have you checked the blue-eyed boy for antennae, tentacles etc? (Bugger, all of those things sound phallic. Do aliens have any non-phallic appendages?) But then, boys can be very weird beasts. (With the attitude to material things, not the appendages… you know what I mean…)
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