Jessica Always Finds the Crap I Misplace

My girlfriend, Jessica, was always really good at finding all the crap I lose. I don't know why the hell I lose things so much, but ever since I was in my early teens, I can't help but misplace things. I don't know how the fuck it happens—but it's as if I repel the things I want—the shit I need most. Jessica had her theories, and I've had my own—a result of too much drinking? A weird brain tumor? It's never really mattered all that much for me to figure out, but it's a pain in the ass to say the least.

Even more annoyingly, almost no one ever believes me when I tell them about it. People always ask the same inane questions:

"When did you last have the (insert literally anything here)?"

"Why don't you re-trace your steps?"

"Are you sure you're remembering it right?" Always the same nothingness empathies: "I lose things a lot too, I'm so disorganized."

Because of this, before I met Jessica, I spent a lot of time alone. But she never said these things. She never doubted, never questioned. She simply, to put it bluntly, found my crap. I asked her once, how she does it. She said she looks against the world—like, she finds that place she is least compelled to see, that crevice just outside the realm of possibility, and that's where she looks, like, looking into nothing.

It sounded like nonsense at first, and I thought she was pulling my leg. Not so much because I couldn't believe her, I mean, it did work after all, but because I could never replicate her results. Believe me, I've tried her strategy. I spend a lot of time looking at nothingness: trying to see that place beyond what eyes can tell, to find where my things go, like Jessica does. I can't seem to pull it off. Everywhere I look simply rises to meet my gaze. Begging to be seen.

When I sit for hours, meditating upon these strange abysses in my own vision, I am almost always drawn to a particular blank patch of wall, just below our kitchen sconce. I often drag over a kitchen chair, and stare right at that spot. I sometimes wonder if anyone has even touched it since the wallpaper was put up. Somehow, there at the crease, where one panel of shitty florals meets the next, there's this little tear in the paper. It's not enough to see standing at the sink, or looking over from the stove. But it's enough for me to see it, sitting there, thinking about how such an imperfection begs to be ignored, and yet I can't seem to look away.

Jessica worries, when I get in these moods. I always shake her off. I can't keep away from that maddening little rip. The last time I looked, almost a week ago now, I could almost see beyond the wall, but not really beyond the wall at all, but as if I understood the little section of wall wasn't really there. The rip was a cover, a gateway, a path to the abyss that has followed me around for the last 15 years. I noticed the tear, really noticed it, and a few days later, everything changed.

On monday, my issue was the worst it's ever been. I misplaced my morning coffee, two emails simply disappeared from my inbox, and on my drive home, beset by an unusually heavy downpour, one of my windshield wipers simply vanished while I waited at a red light. When I got home, I set my keys down on the kitchen counter, turned around to open the fridge, and my keys were gone. Hearing my grunt of frustration, Jessica wandered in. She found them, instantly, slipped between the moldy loaf of bread and the wall—ah, the wall. The wall that wasn't really a wall at all. I felt crazy, and I called it an early night. I work to a throbbing headache, and in the morning, I got ready as quickly as possible and rushed out of the house, not eager to lose anything else to the wall. At work, things were surprisingly stable. Nothing went missing; nothing disappeared. I thought, perhaps I solved it? Perhaps I figured it all out. I drove home, happily thinking of what Jessica and I would watch on Netflix when I got home. But as I unlocked the front door of our tiny condo, I knew something was wrong. The lights were out. Jessica is deathly afraid of the dark, and keeps the house lit up at all hours. I pushed the door inward, jostling with my key ring to find the little solar-powered flashlight I (try) to keep on the ring. Of course, it wasn't there. Stumbling through my living room, I called out to Jessica, only to be met by silence. I tried to flip on the lights, but the power was out. I shuffled from one room to the next, finding no one. Jessica was gone. Lost.