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Lost-Then-Found Objects


C.W. Bryan


Lost objects are never useless they simply lack proper context. My fiancée recently built me a new nightstand out of a deconstructed palette she picked up from behind the Goodwill on Bader Avenue. It is a good nightstand unfinished so I can place my water cup on it and not worry about little white rings. I am terrible with coasters so she made me this something out of something else.
            Right now it holds:
            A cup of water I forgot to drink last night.
            A mug of coffee I have yet to drink this morning.
            A rubber-band used to contain a boxless deck of cards.
            A boxless deck of cards.
            The key to the crawlspace I am meant to get copied at Home Depot but keep forgetting.

I like to find keys in very inconspicuous and sudden places. Beneath a bench in Merchant City, for example, or, if I’m really lucky, on the floorboards of the last train back from a place I’ll never visit again.
            It is best when the keys are alone without the burden of a key chain and devoid of any immediately obvious relationship to other keys. Their aloneness contributes to their mystery it compounds it. Just the same way seeing a stray dog is more interesting than seeing several stray dogs together then you don’t ruminate so much about them at least they have each other.
            Keys belong in two places primarily. Either in a lock or on the way to a lock, typically riding in the soft, dark carriage of a pocket or purse. If someone sets their keys on the table in front of them on the train I don’t get excited I hardly look at: them. It is too easy to imagine them being turned in their front door that I don’t even bother.
            Lost and lonely sudden keys are so full of energy they are radioactive. Little silver (usually) nuclear reactors I never touch them. The energy they contain is purely potential. They are keynetically inert until picked up.

In Virginia Woolf’s 1920 short story ‘Solid Objects’ (one of the most human stories ever written) a man finds a lump of green glass after sticking his hand in the sand while sitting on the beach. This is a great place to find any object a key found buried in the sand would be Chernobyl. The man in the story rightly becomes obsessed with: solid objects. He abandons his burgeoning political career and begins to collect innocuous things which he then displays on his mantle to no one’s appreciation save his own. His name is John and John is filled with purpose none of his friends understand him. He is suprahuman he has unlocked the potential energy of lost-then-found objects.

If I ever lacked purpose I would go to Merchant City and find a key under a bench pick it up then spend the rest of my life searching for the lock it belongs to. It is a calling anyone can have. Most keys belong to locks. I am not involved in politics but I get a lot of value (for now) from writing silly little essays about keys and solid objects.
            As soon as I write the last line of the last essay about objects I admire it will be over for me and I will be nothing but a key-fiending radioactive obsessive which, all things considered, is not the worst thing a person can be. Imagine being a politician, for example.

A non-exhaustive list of objects I still have to write about:
            Tennis balls.
            Strawberry margaritas.
            Pour-over coffee filters.
            Black knights on green and white chess boards.
            Those little stone frog statues sitting the Buddha people put in their front yards.

As far as I am concerned ‘Solid Objects’ has two potential readings depending on the lens your eyeball is operating with:

            1. John, it could be said, decimates the kinetic potential of his life—active friendships forgotten, political and professional success sacrificed—for the sake of placing funky little objects on his mantelpiece. Obsession, it seems, can become and destroy you.
            2. The value of human-living is too often measured by our affective power on society; human worth judged and graded on a scale where 1 is stagnancy and 10 is impact—productivity is perfection. John, recognizing the weight of expectation and conformity pressing on his shoulders, shrugs, and finds he prefers the weight of green glass in his hand and broken china on his mantlepiece. Worthless items can become and enrich you.

For example:
            I asked my girlfriend out in the ninth grade by folding an apple juice box straw over on itself like a ring.
            She said yes.
            We are getting married next October.