On the General Being of Lostness

Lostness is the You Are Here, the red star that the mall map linked to GPS. As if you’d stared into your nowhere like a sun and photoreceptors compensated with a point. Lostness is an immaculately well-dressed person or a room laid out like charcuterie. It’s a feeling someone loves you after a ten-minute talk. Oh yes, but lostness is loving someone too, knowing you would take the raft out further if it meant a few more minutes. Sometimes, I want to tell my dog that I’m the only one in the world who knows her whereabouts and that’s lostness but it’s lived in. It isn’t sadness. Lostness is the job I had in ’98 in a warehouse unpacking chic decor where I began to unravel and unmake the very things the company was selling. It was the boxes I moved forward on the shelves until they lined up well, pop choruses that played again for the beautiful and found. It’s almost gladness. It’s the walk I took one day trying to decide should I live in Montreal? and thinking that I knew something to make it plain. Lostness is the many rains of money that I once watched from an open window. It’s long been here. It was the semilunate carpal flowering in late-Cretaceous bones where everything was going then never more unclear. It was the first prokaryote closing off its little O and all that it could be instead. But lostness is a steady wage. I remember when my grandfather would come home from the squats and thousand double checks of electrical work and wash his hands: all the dirt moved in his laundry sink like garter snakes that turned up under stones, a living current so bearable in its lostness that I could know it, only, for a hundred years and still be happy. Lostness was the school I went to where leaving crumbs on rectangles of paper meant showing the way someone would have to come. It was having your knapsack up on the table like a personal flotation device. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that lostness is always there on the lip of everything, like lichen or a bomb. There is a loving lostness that if you look deep into, you see a great balance beam that everything that was, or is, or that may be, is standing on.