Finding the Lost

Today has consisted of hanging about the house while Adam plays a collection of PS3 games--the most time spent on a tactical warfare game involving scouts, shocktroopers, engineers, snipers, two empires fighting over resources and a small country caught up in the battles, and lead by a biology student who became a tank operator in order to defend his little country. I grew up on Final Fantasy Tactics, where my scouts were thieves, my shocktroopers were monks, engineers were priests, (and snipers were either archers or engineers depending on how you look at them). Watching him play through the game--listening to the story, grimacing at the near-death his favorite sniper just felt, and finding myself curious about what will take place in the next story chapter--gave me the inklings to pull out the DS version of Tactics. (It isn't anything near the story and quality of the original game, mind you, but my experience teaches me that questioning inklings only brings pain.)

That thought turned into an hour of searching through my less-organized-than-I-thought desk, looking for the Nintendo DS that I haven't had any real reason to look for in a good while. Still, I can specifically remember placing it in the little cubby of my desk after removing it from my black back that now contains too many D&D books for my shoulder to happilly tote on Monday nights. I can recall the texture of the raised rectangles on the top, the faux-leather interior of the bag on the back of my hand. I still have the tiny scrape between my index and middle fingers' fist-knuckles where the poorly engineered keyboard tray bit into me as I absentmindedly put the DS into the aforementioned cubby. With such vivid detail still fresh in my mind, despite having no real recollection of exactly how long ago it was that I put the system there, how is it that I'm wrong? Why, when I returned to the cubby, avoiding the tray's little tooth, did I not find the DS? Logic should say that I moved it. No one else is to blame, both because there'd be no other person who would care to use my DS nor look in a cubby of a desk to begin with. I've had no reason to get it or go there either, though.

How many other things can I think of that have vanished in similar ways? I can think of three. First, an unbelievably silly toy that I had as a child. I cannot even say for certain what it was, only that I remember it was a strange noise-making 'thing' that was an additional part to some other toy--an action figure or something like that. I remember I liked the wide array of noises it would make. It was tombstone-shaped. It had buttons--probably eight or ten, symmetrical. I put it in the top junk drawer of my bedroom in my childhood house, a room that is now ten feet from the bedroom I now call my own, though the broken dresser is long gone. (Of the five drawers, the bottom two were destroyed long before I used the furnishing, so the top two were just for various junk, the 'middle' contained 48 VHS tapes that had all but three episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) I remember looking for that strange little noise-making toy probably more than twenty times from the moment I realized it was gone until I finally moved out of the room. I'm sure I gave a final look that last night at nineteen, too. The second was a strange, elastic, interlocking-loop belt that was definitely my mother's (or at the very least designed for a woman). I was fascinated by the belt, though, for its unique buckle. My own belts were the exact same that you'd find in any men's department: a loop, stick the belt through, put the single weirdly-bent metal bar through, and it'll fit into the little lip of the buckle. This one, though, looked ornate--at least to a thirteen-year-old. Two curving gold-and-silver U-shaped loops that required a little trick of your wrist to get them to link together. When done properly, they turned into a strange kind of open-centered shield. It was evidence of the Arcane. Mysterious forces had to be at work behind such a strange piece of clothing. I took it from my mom's room, modeled it in front of the mirror. I didn't care about the feminine qualities it had--perhaps already subconsciously aware that I would walk a different path from Dad's version of masculinity, but more likely attracted to how perfectly it'd fit some sort of wizardly robe (which I did not own, but committed to making some day so it'd go along with my new treasure). I looped it carefully through a ring in my closet, linking the loops so they would show prominently whenever I opened the door. One day, it was just gone. I never saw it again, so I have concluded my mom didn't find and retrieve it. My imagination invented reasons why it'd gone. Accepting them, I was mixed with happy sorrow as I had lost a magic item but could certainly believe it had been magic. Why else would someone magick it away from me, but to obtain its power? The last was my little spark of faith in something far greater than myself. I say that I was five, but perhaps I was a little older--whatever the absolute youngest I could have been to be permitted to go for a walk by myself into the nearby woods in the trailor court, my first home. [Read: trailor court or the woods as my first home, as I'm not sure I can say 100% which I really mean.] I felt something in those woods. A spirit? An intelligence? A power? I was too young to know what to call it, but I was also far too young to deny what I experienced by applying logic and rational thought. There'd been what my memory calls a wolf. It'd been close, and it'd talked to me. I'd felt it, and never before and never since have I felt so secure in my knowledge of how the world... how the whole universe worked. Much of my life, since, has been a struggle to find that sort of security in my faith... knowledge... place in the world.

All I know for certain, is that I'd gladly give up ever finding where I put that freaking Nintendo DS if it meant increasing my chances of finding that five-year-old wisdom again.