Losing things that you wanted to keep forever is generally awful, whether it's your girlfriend, your mother at the circus when you were only 6 years old, a piece of jewellery that has been in your family for years, or even silly material things like a manky old scarf you've become attached to over the years.
Yes the latter just happened to me :(
The dread feeling of losing something comes in sickeningly slow stages:
- Firstly you get a passing thought that stays in your mind for about a split second. Something like "Hmmm, I'm feeling quite chilly around my neck".
- Several seconds or minutes later, your brain readdresses the issue in a relaxed whine. "Hmmm, where's my scarf then?"
- You look in the spaces your Lost Thing is supposed to be, like your pockets, or your bag, or wallet, or even in your heart (in the case of mums and girlfriends). You search for it slowly at first, and then faster and faster in the same places where you know it isn't, which is about the same time that feeling starts to dawn on you.
- That feeling arrives. The "I've Lost It!!" feeling that turns your gut into a ball of hopelessness and disbelief.
- You won't stop searching for a while until all of your hope is crushed.
- And maybe, just maybe, if you're really lucky and have good karma you'll find it again some time in the future.
- But you may know there's very little chance of it coming back, then you'll have to start to let go slowly. Very sad, but proper closure is much much better than taking that hole in your soul around with you forever.
There'll be other scarfs I guess, and I'll always have happy memories.