It was important to me to return my least favorite roommates pants.
Really, things start much earlier. There was a wallet I got as a child. When I try to think back to it, the details begin to blur. It was small and denim with some embroidered detailing in pink or maybe purple. I was young enough I don’t remember my age, maybe 6. I had no need for a wallet. Nothing of value to carry in it. But I thought it was a beautiful thing and a gift and I loved it dearly. I lost it. Somewhere. Somehow. The way children lose so many things. Dropped on a floor or a bench unnoticed. I remember it simply as being there one day and gone the next. for months, I looked everywhere I could think: in the house, my backpack, my pockets, the lost and found. It never did turn up again. I think about that little wallet to this day.
I once thought I was going to die in an airplane crash. I sat there in the sky, thinking through my whole life, tallying it up in my mind. The worst part was that I was leaving on vacation, not returning home. I thought about my trip itinerary, a laundry list of things I would never do. I thought of the people who I would never again see and the goodbyes I had never even thought to say. Of course, in the end I lived. A minor malfunction and emergency landing left me alive to write this story today. Of course, these days I don’t leave any business unfinished when I step on a plane.
I was finishing a summer semester in Florence. My least favorite roommate left a day before the rest of us. While scouring through our final clean we found a pair of sweatpants that didn’t belong to any of us. I texted to confirm, and they were indeed hers. No one was sure what to do with them. (Perhaps I do my other roommates a disservice and they would have done the same thing I did. Whichever it was, I was the one who volunteered.) I packed them in my suitcase, brought them home, and mailed them to her shortly after. I never really considered this a big kindness on my part. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. There was something so sad to me about these pants being lost in Italy. About a person, even one I never especially liked, losing something she could never get back. Maybe they were her favorite pants, or maybe they weren’t. Who was I to decide whether they were worth saving? Who was fate to decide either? We lose things all the time, by happenstance or carelessness. I have always hated to lose things. I could not simply do nothing.
There is something scary about the idea of packing a suitcase to travel to a foreign country and not bringing it all home. It represents something bigger, somehow. The concept behind liminal spaces is that the in-betweens of this world are frightening and confusing. Travelling is a kind of liminal space in which we might go so far as to lose our very selves. I step off a plane in a foreign country where no one knows me as an infinite possibility. I could entirely reinvent myself. But to do so would be the death of myself. We never truly know what we lose when we grow and change. We hope we lose less than we gain. But we never find certainty. Liminality lives in that uncertainty.
A loss is an eternal question mark, a road not travelled. It symbolizes all the things which could happen (which could never happen). It unsettles us deeply in the way only an unanswerable question can. Humans are nothing more than complicated pattern detecting machines at the end of the day. We thrive on routine. We love a small mystery, a puzzle, but give us anything bigger, pose an unsolvable question and watch us fall to pieces. Watch us invent gods and religions and nations to fill the answerable void. They say that nature abhors a vacuum, but perhaps we are simply projecting.
We were not made to understand loss, most other animals do not grieve as we do. Some trick of evolution allowed our minds to contemplate futures and possibilities so that we could forever miss what we do not have. I think about a life in which I never lost my wallet and imagine myself much happier. Every time I board a plane I think about a world in which I never step off it and so I hesitate before taking that last step. I make sure people know I love them because I do not want to carry anger to my grave. I think about the lost pants and how maybe I saved someone who passed uncomfortably through my life a little emptiness by returning them.
To fill emptiness is an act of creation, the greatest love of all.
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