Accidental Obsolescence

Memory is a doorway. It tunnels through the untouched smell, the dank air in parking basements, the chipped wooden tables, the clear plastic bins, the heavy ones, the thick-walled ones, the grey lids. Wherever you go, there is always a lost and found. Sometimes they would disappear like shifting sands, tables materializing on an arbitrary Tuesday, layers of sweaters, jackets, some small enough to fit a toddler, some that would go down to my knees. A few months later, the tables would reappear, halfway across campus but there all the same. Now there is a plastic bin in the front office, laden with ID cards, forgotten jewelry, broken headphones. Anyone here would know the real treasure trove is downstairs. Textbooks from past years, future years, uniform skirts that brim cardboard boxes, metal water bottles like ancient petrified forests.

There are always ghosts in a lost and found. They twine like serpents through plastic laundry baskets, lingering. These are the apparitions of us who lost these shirts, these objects that insinuate our existence but display our absence. Queued on the plywood shelves, apparitions of memories that slip into empty wallets like polaroid pictures.

I am looking for a pink jacket with rings of foamy insulation, a paint-chipped zipper with plastic teeth. Here, the ghosts live in the winter-worn hood and fleece pockets. This was my least favorite, a jacket that my mother zipped up to my neck when the trampled turf receded under snow, real snow. We rolled a mud-streaked snowman, bottlecap eyes and twig arms. The jacket is stained: scuffs from a dusty blacktop, streaks of acrylic paint, remnants of crushed grass. I scan the plastic tables and the ghosts descend upon me, dove wings woven from recollection, cold glass sandboxes. There is a bus stop, frost between concrete stones. We chased it, once, tailing its beetle-blue body, until those wheels turned to a stop and the door rattled open. The stairs are linoleum lined, the seats are fake leather.

Dandelions, eyelashes, clock times, stars. For a day or two when I was younger, I spent all my wishes on an off-brand chapstick. It was a navy-blue tube, berry mauve on the inside and it tasted like artificial happiness. It was almost a permanent staple in my pocket; I was constantly running my fingers along the smooth sides and curved corners, tracing circles, until one day it was gone. The ghosts hide in the fissure between the cap and the body, flying spirals and cylinders of memory. They talk to me about medicine cabinets, the stagnant smell of bandages and gauze, the taste of cherry-flavored fever treatment, that same taste, only sweeter.

A public pool locker room is the perfect place to lose swim goggles. They have a milky white band and glassy eyeseals, leaving marks on my cheeks and across the bridge of my nose. They taught us to spit in the concave shot-glass lenses then rinse them out to stop the fingerlets of fog from creeping in. After months in the forever-wet locker room, the ghosts now speak with chlorinated language, breaths tinted blue from pool water. They whisper in singsong poetry. Clutching lane lines until angry red marks from plastic against skin start to sprout on my fingertips and the insides of my upper arms. Legs kicking like a rabbit in a snare, windmills, pinwheels, caught in sweet escape but I feel frantically slow. The woman never stops screaming, her voice tangled like fish tails through little girls’ hair and knotted knees, her platform flip-flops crushed against plastic pool gutters. Through those lenses I remember diving, cold then freezing, still then reeling.

Five millimeters, seven, nine. My lucky pencil has a pink cartridge, inches of lead that have turned to centimeters in the churning plastic. The notch where the eraser should go is chipped and bent and cracked, the clip is snapped clean off. Now it lives in concrete gaps or carpeted floors, and I ask my friends when I need impermanence: pencils are the currency of classrooms, traded and loaned. The ghosts lurk in the conic tip, slipping in and out where graphite should be and where remembrance is. Today they are mirrors: me in an office room, pacing back and forth. A woman sits outside the glass, back against plaster wall, watching. Me in my bedroom, white computer screen and black serif text, white paper and black numbers, grey erasure. Me in a tile-floor, tile-ceiling classroom, plastic and aluminum chairs, ink-stained whiteboards and forgetfulness. With pencils come notebooks, and with notebooks come summers, a box of items labeled found and lost.