She doesn't believe it, I'm sure. It is hard each and every time.

You can depend upon me attempting to take such tender care of a miscellaneous object, and always loving it so well that I become deeply concerned by the idea that it could slip through my fingers, that my losing whatever it might be, for sanity's sake, could be nothing other than fated. It makes perfect sense. A thing that I am not frantic about stays around for as long as can be. A thing that I should and feel I must hold onto so preoccupies me in a quest to keep it always about me, or in its proper place, that I am certain to quickly move it somewhere for safe-keeping thinking 'I will surely remember that I've stuck this here..." or "This place is so odd a pocket in which to keep something so unrelated to this place's function that when I think of the thing, I will remember immediately the oddity and be taken right to my loved keepsake..." It never turns out this way. Instead, my seeming secured thing is no longer in need of me worrying over it and I so thoroughly forget its existence that my recent little obsession over it would appear to be more superficial than it actually was to me. In those moments. I can forget things so well that their entering the realm of lost...being lost...of loss (what best to call it, I can't decide)...can take long and long whiles. Years, I'm saying. Weeks or months as well, but yes, even years.

When next I remember by wanting the thing--in that very moment, there is no lukewarm taste for it--it is a beastly hunger I can drum up. It puts me in the mind of those Medieval biles you learned of in school (if you were lucky in your bit of public education). Only I've got one all my own that comes out as a result of having lost my...or being in a state of loss about...my thing. It is as if it made me well, or helped to...as well as I am, anyway. Without it I froth and spill over, at the mouth and other orifices, a globule-filled, blinding green (that is neon, you understand), cottage cheese-like substance. And it burns, the realization that it is gone, which is how the loss manifests. The realization of the loss is the burning, blinding, green bile that my body expels from all the open orifices (not counting the skin's pores, which makes for a more meaningful and unsettling visual). And there are tears. Silent tears. It's hard to explain but it's something that Julie Taymor could effectively make three-dimensional and beautiful, even as the image breaks each heart it encounters.

All that and I haven't yet said what is gone from me. It isn't what you think it is, either. I can't write about that anymore, in explicit or inexplicit ways. What it is or what they are...books. Two. The first one is Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The other and newest is Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.

I was aware of having lost Wuthering Heights, this particular edition (because I still do have a less meaningful, really old and delicate copy taunting me from the shelf as I write), about a year ago. It was an academic acquisition, although my reading of it very soon turned into one characterized by the admiration that could only come from a sensitive and hopelessly romantic forgotten-girl where the favor of men is concerned. Do you know this already? But there is a character called Heathcliff. Do you know that he says "I ought to have sweat blood then, from the anguish of my yearning..." It is about Catherine. He loves her. Wuthering Heights is not a romance novel. It is a great, moving, insightful, skillfully crafted piece of literature. I'm sorry for you if you've stayed away from it because you believed what "they" say about it. Truly, I understand because I did, too. As I said, I was reading it then for a class. I came to love it like a finishing piece of myself. Now lost, that one I want--the first. With my notes. My first impressions. My talking back to the author and Heathcliff and Catherine and Linton and the Earnshaws and Nelly and Joseph and Hareton. Talking back in blue. I remember that my favorite pen then was blue and I used it to bleed all over it with. And I want those first reaction/impressions/interaction/conversations with the book back. It's the copy I think of as mine. I have and could buy more and more others. But I've lost mine.

Brighton Rock is what I wanted tonight because of how Pinkie made the damnedest effort to change, to get away from who he was, but it was all through him...I remember that more than anything. No one changes. We are what we come from and we are always who we have been. No matter the multitudinous ways we try to cinch a cloak around the truth, there is no getting out of you the very places and things that formed you. And I'm feeling like that tonight. And it's a comfort. But its a handicap as well.

God knows where my books are. And how many more of them I have been too careless of. I'm tired of losing things that I love. But I keep making it happen somehow. All I think I'm doing is being myself, but it's the myself that keeps pushing over into lost my loved things.

I want them all back. Right. Now. Burns with it.

I always think of this poem when I lose one particular kind of thing. Because of the place at the end where she doesn't want to admit that she has lost Him. Everything could be momentary, more misplaced...not nearly as decisive as having to admit to lost.


"One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.