Sunday, April 29, 2018

Links about Loss

So I was going through the endless windows I have open on my desktop, trying to see if I can close any of them or whether they all have to stay open in case I might someday need to read them again, and I found these two links that seem oddly related to one another.  I wonder if I have some kind of issues about loss, and that's what prevents me from closing links casually, just assuming I'll be able to find them again?  I guess that's worth looking into, but in the meantime, here are two beautiful essays to read.

Map of a Small Loss
by Hillery Stone

"When you lose something you want desperately to find, you begin to see it everywhere, just before you actually turn to look.  These visions are an attempt, both impossible and compulsive, to will the lost back into being.

When I was young I liked a dark story, pulled from Mexican folklore, about a brave rabbit who sees a starving Aztec god and offers herself -- her own breathing body -- to save his life.  The tale came back to me when I was combing our block for the matted-down figure of my two-year-old's beloved stuffed bunny, who had vanished on a walk to the grocery store.  What dark exchange had transpired when my back was turned?  My mind was taking measurements across an intricate field of vision, assessing how far an inanimate object could conceivably go from its drop-point in thirty minutes. How was this bunny suddenly nowhere?

and the other one:

A Map of Lost Things
by Jamila Osman

"Nobody leaves home thinking they will never return.  I wonder what my parents would have taken with them when they left their home in Somalia in the late '80s.  Who might they have made amends with, what old haunts would they visit one last time if they knew they would never be back?"

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