MATTHEW DAY

An Anachronistic List of Things I Have Lost in response to Brian Arundel's Things I've Lost

A game of pool against my father, during which I scored no points and he told me I needed to practice. A DS cartridge for Kirby Super Star Ultra in my mother’s blue, buglike car, on a trip home from the grocery store. My favorite pair of pants, circa tenth grade, and then a poem I had written about those pants. My mattress, at sixteen, when my mother decided she wanted a new art exhibit she picked the skin and cleansed the bones with fire, and she hung my mattress’s springs on her wall, believing I would be unbothered. At seventeen, during the plague, a compass and a trowel, both deep in the woods. At eighteen, the expectation that my sister wanted anything more to do with me than cosplay family in front of her friends.

Red hair, gradually between the ages of three and four, as I grew into brown. In early 2019, a half-read copy of Les Miserables, a shortened version that had pictures from the film. That same year, my first therapist, who was hardly any help, when he decided to move to Washington unannounced. One of the two copies I had of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game that I once spent a whole summer playing and replaying. My grandmother, when dementia took her memory, and again three years later on Groundhog’s Day, when her body gave up (This was the first time the cloaked, undying drifter visited me.) My grandfather, as well, on a foggy May morning, in a claustrophobic white hospital room, after eight years as a widower. (His second visit; he is no longer a stranger )

An annotated version of the Haftarah and Pentateuch (a gift from my grandmother), a copy of the Aeneid (signed by my favorite teacher), and other books of varying importance (including a complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays), right before I started college—all donated by my sister, without my knowledge, to a Goodwill. Recently, the ability to play the piano the same way I used to The desire to play Franz Liszt once I realized my hands and many people’s hands were much too small. Any interest in listening to or playing Jazz. A concern for wealth when I decided I valued my health and comfort more than monetary gain A year ago, during an in-class analysis of James Merrill’s “The Broken Home,” my distaste for poetry. A rigid plan for my future, roughly a month into my first semester of college, after fully realizing the world would end in fire and my career would neither support me nor save me.

Any love for the winter during a snowstorm two months ago. An untold amount of buttons and pins in various odd places during road trips to Ohio. Myself, once, when I had the bright idea of jumping head first into a bank of freshly fallen snow. Old classmates, thrice, twice to a car crash and once to a brain tumor, and consequently, while the cloaked, undying drifter still holds me under his thumb, the belief I will live forever. Often, my heart, but most memorably in high school, when I discovered my first love had been cheating on me (or, rather, on his girlfriend with me) for two years. My freedom, when I got my license and was forced to give up extracurriculars to support my younger brothers.

In 2015, when I learned the world was not kind to people like me, the ability to sleep soundly. In early 2021, the ability to painlessly survive a sleepless night, and in late 2021, the ability to sleep without hypnotics. In the stillness of midnight and the light of the watching moon—upon the sudden and malicious realization that my most cherished friends care for me only as far as my ability to provide—any and all faith in friendship, personal value, and solicitude. My mind, on a Sunday morning during a neurotic episode in front of co-workers and customers, after which my boss dropped me off at the emergency room, where the doctors somehow lost a cup of my urine. After the doctors decided they could not help me, instead sending me away and placing me under a crude mockery of involuntary commitment, two weeks of my life. Since then, sweet comfort, that elusive goddess, to the faceless devil that rages deep, deep in my mind, body, and soul to the beguiling traitor who conspires with the cloaked, undying drifter to the venom-spitting, never-satisfied gatekeeper of my seventh heaven and my seventh hell.

Chapstick: constantly.