It’s been interesting to watch my mind’s permutations of the story of what happened to this necklace. The photo is from six years ago, at Felix’s One Hundredth Birthday party. I can’t imagine it’s been missing for that long, but this is the most recent evidence I can find of having it. I’ve actively searched the house, Mothership, safety deposit box, everywhere I can possibly look, for the past couple of months. Before that, I think I started passively looking for it a year or two ago, assuming it would turn up eventually, safely stowed away in one of the places I recently turned over looking for it.

When searches failed, I felt this shadowy memory creep up of having given it to someone on whom it looked better than it did on me; at the same time, I imagined myself loaning it to someone who asked to borrow it. These things would have had to have happened prior to 2020, though, because of the Covid time warp. So somewhere between six and four years ago, I misplaced, mislaid, loaned, or gave away this precious necklace that I truly valued. I bought it at an art opening, a centerpiece of the beadwork of an old, dear friend; it felt expensive at the time, but it was well worth it. Now she’d like to display it in a big show of her new and old work; hence the urgent search.

As I worked on this ‘Wanted Poster’ last night, a dark suspicion arose. Could it be? The last time I know that I wore this I was with a man I’d been dating a few months. Not long after that he ghosted me, and I discovered later that every single thing he’d said to gain my trust had been a lie. Instead of being single for three years, as he’d said on our very first date, he had been in a steady relationship for eight or nine years with a woman in Grand Junction. I agonized over my naivety for months, grappling with humiliation, rage, and shame. I still haven’t truly recovered in some way from the inconceivable depth of his calculated deception.

And so, I imagined suddenly, looking at pictures of that party, not remembering if I ever saw the necklace after he vanished, and knowing full well this is just the way the mind works, that he stole the necklace and gave it to his girlfriend as a welcome home gift. That last night he kissed me goodbye, after telling me that he had to go to Denver for a few days to be with his cousin who was very sick and probably dying: I never heard from him again. But I did hear from his girlfriend a couple of weeks later, after a chain of events led to our discovering each other, that there was no dying cousin: he’d been with her after she returned from a long work trip.

I’m sad about the missing necklace, and a little concerned that I simply cannot remember the last time I knew where it was. But I’m grateful to have learned recently that our memories are far less accurate than we tend to think they are. “People believe that memory should be effortless, but their expectations for how much they should remember are totally out of whack with how much they’re capable of remembering,” says researcher Charan Ranganath, professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Davis. And I’m grateful that I have some photos of the necklace (even though I had to crop out the creep). And I’m grateful that meditation and mindfulness practice have given me the ability to loosen my grip on afflictive emotions like resentment, shame, and clinging. The necklace may turn up somewhere, sometime: Maybe I did give it or loan it and the poster will bring it forth; its creator imagines it is somewhere “tucked tenderly & safely in a soft, dark bag – just waiting to be found.”