I lost my keys last Tuesday. I’m so tight-fisted when it comes to my keys, so losing my keys is pretty major, it’s almost unthinkable. The circumstances make the fact even more incredible.
I had just gotten a drink at Jamba Juice on New Montgomery Street. I unlocked my bike and proceeded to walk it to school a block and a half away. I got to school, placed my drink on top of a newspaper vending machine and realized that my keys were gone. It was less than five minutes since I had unlocked my bike and I set out to find them.
The keys must have fallen out of my pocket, and that in itself is incredible, but I also didn’t hear them, which just blows my mind. (one of my housemates doubted my perceptions and questioned my certainty that I should have heard them. In contrast, Anita pointed out without any prompt that I should have heard them fall since I’m very aural).
I don’t know how many times I walked back and forth between the point where I last had the keys and the point where I realized they were gone. I was obsessing and it stayed in my mind that I would find them. I searched for the keys on this block and a half stretch for no less than 45 minutes.
A flood of thoughts has resulted from the lost keys. Maybe they relate to what I mentioned in the previous entry, involving people in my life and relationships. There also may be some relevance in understanding the break-up with Josephine and her importance to me.
Losing the keys are having quite an effect on my psyche. Losing them was so unthinkable that I’ve been really neurotic and paranoid about closing doors that will lock; going through thresholds that I might not be able to get back through. I’ve always had a problem with losing things. My reaction to losing things ties into why I’m afraid of heights, which I’ve identified as really being a fear of losing things irrevocably. So my logic in connecting it, and it may be a stretch, is that we also lose friends, people, relationships, friendships.
“Losing” people? My friends knew that I was notorious for exiting peoples’ lives in a seemingly callous, sometimes arbitrary manner. I would just disappear, fall off the radar screen as Frances put it. “Meaningful” relationships that I would just decide to drop. So now I pause and ask myself how meaningful they could have been if I could drop them just because I felt like it. Was I really losing those friendships? You can’t lose something that you never had. Those “meaningful” relationships haven’t exactly been enthusiastically welcoming the return of my company.
Keys unlock doors, they are access, security. In friends we find access and security. Friendships are keys. The failure of the re-acquaintancing has pointed out to me that perhaps the meaning of those friendships wasn’t really reciprocated because they sensed that I was keeping them at an arms distance. I didn’t value them as much as I should have. The value of keys becomes very prominent when you lose them.
Friends, I kept them at an arms distance because of my fear of losing them. My fear of losing them caused me to make sure they were disposable to me and I to them. They never were the access and security I thought they were, the people I thought I loved were never key(s) to me.
The more I talk about it, the more of a stretch it sounds. I need to consider the nature of the relationships I have and how I need to be treating them and the nature of “loss”. The message is clearer with the band: when you find people in your tribe, the relationships that are meaningful, I can’t be afraid of losing them and keeping them at an arms distance. I have to give them my all and consider them permanent fixtures in my life.
