Excitement in the newspaper world

As I’m leaving work yesterday, late as always, it’s dark out so I stick my sunglasses in my j-school hoodie pocket, grab the camera and note pad and make the arduous trek 200m home through a cold wind and blowing snow…uphill…both ways.

Just kidding the block between my house & office never seems far, too close sometimes if anything, but far enough that when I step into my house, put my camera and notepad on the table beside the door and realise I dropped my sunglasses somewhere on route, I don’t really want to go back. But I do. Scouring the dark alley and trying to remember when I bought them. They have no actual value by this point; they probably cost me $10 like 10 years ago, maybe a bit of sentimental value.

There’s a great episode of the original Twighlight Zone where they explain time is like a string of train cars representing each minute with everyone moving from one car to the next. Time elves construct the entire world from scratch in each car ahead of us, which explains how sometimes when we can’t find something one minute it then turns up a minute later right where we thought it should have been – the elves forgot it in that car, but remember it in the subsequent one and replaced it.

So I get right to the front door and am a bit surprised and annoyed to not have found them. I assumed they must have fallen out when I was locking the door, plus if they weren’t laying in the alley, but safe back in the office, there was no point in going back out in the wet and cold to retrieve them, plus now I have lock and unlock two doors to go in and confirm they’re there…but they’re not.

I search all over the office remembering vividly picking up my stuff and putting them in my pocket and wondering how I could have missed them in the alley. I head back out, lock both doors and walk slowly back up the alley between my office and apartment, retracing my steps. Thanks to the snow I can literally trace my steps and I’m even scanning a wide swath where I know they didn’t go.

I’m checking and re-checking my pockets as I go (though they’re not that small) and by the time I get to my front door I’m realising I must have put them on my table with my camera and notepad and somehow missed them all along.

But they’re not there. My apartment is small. As this was Monday, the day after my one day available for cleaning, my table was empty and my kitchen was clean and empty. And I literally hadn’t ventured more than a step into my place, so if they were there they HAD to be on the table, which they weren’t…or under the table, which they weren’t…or behind the door, which they weren’t…or in my goddamn pocket which I checked for the 20th time.

By this point, hungry, cold, wet and tired (from the long day not the arduous trek) I could care less about the fucking glasses, but the whole thing was pissing me off. I found myself standing dazed in the middle of my small, simple, empty kitchen. I was questioning whether I’d ever owned sunglasses or if this was even my apartment. I was pretty confident on both those points. I almost wished my place was a bit messier so I could have the satisfaction of tearing it apart knowing full well they couldn’t go far. Remember I hadn’t even stepped far enough into my place to close the door behind me and the only things on the table where my camera and note pad.

By this point in my long winded story telling you can probably guess it’s 2am and I’m avoiding actual work I have to do by morning. People have been bugging me to post, which I appreciate, but, aside from the lack of time, I honestly just don’t have much to say. I go to work I come home, watch some TV before I pass out then go to work and come home and occasionally lose sunglasses.

Anyway, I turned on all the lights and sat down where I could gaze at the table and ponder. I searched around again, and now completely pissed, I went back outside to search around under the stairs and corners of the little parking lot I’d never been in, let alone on my way home that time. I considered walking back and forth the block to work again but I was confident I’d searched that well.

I eventually just gave up, shed a few tears for the loss, assumed someone had found them in the alley in the 37 seconds I was out of sight (without leaving footprints in the fresh snow) and that was that. I walked back into my apartment to find them sitting with my camera on top of my notepad.