Losing Things
There was a half second, most mornings, where his hand knew the shape of the doorknob before his eyes caught up. A half second where the hallway felt narrower than it should, like a hallway remembered wrong. Eli had stopped mentioning it to anyone. It never lasted long enough to be worth explaining, and explaining it made it sound like more than it was. Today it lasted just long enough for him to notice his own hand hesitate over the key bowl that wasn't there anymore, reaching for a rhythm his body hadn't given up on yet.
He was not, historically, a man who lost things twice a week. He wanted that on the record, even if the only one keeping the record was himself. He reached for the coat by the door, an old wool thing he hadn't worn since sometime last winter, more out of habit than hope, patting the pockets down the way you pat down a coat you already expect to be empty. His fingers found metal. Cold, familiar, unmistakably shaped like his own house key on its ring with the little enamel pin Juan had given him for his birthday two years ago, a cartoon syringe that said WORLD'S OKAYEST PHLEBOTOMIST.
He stood there another second with the keys in his open palm, waiting for the relief to arrive the way relief was supposed to arrive, and instead there was just a flat, funny blankness where the feeling should have been. He had absolutely no memory of putting them there. None. Not a flicker, not the ghost of a memory, nothing to hang the fact on. It should have bothered him more than it did. He filed it, the way he'd been filing things like this for months now, under a heading in his mind that didn't have a name yet, and told himself he'd think about it later, which was what he always told himself, and which was, as far as he could tell, a complete and total lie every single time.
He didn't have a name for it yet, not really, though some nights, lying awake, he came close to one. It was as if some part of him had been elsewhere in the exact moments he most needed to be here, and the memory of touching his own keys, his own coat, his own life, had simply never finished forming, the way a photograph never finishes developing if you pull it out of the chemical bath too soon. He was the one who was lost, not the object.
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