Object Permanence

The things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget

I lost a necklace recently. My grandfather, dad's dad, made it for me - he was a hobbyist jeweller and a rockhound. He made three necklaces, one each for my brother and sister and me, but he died before he could give them to us. Instead, at his wake, my grandma held out her hand with the three pieces of pounamu and told us to choose one each - shaped, polished, only missing a cord to hold them around our necks. It was the day of my sixteenth birthday. My friend Hanna had planned a surprise party for me, she told me weeks before 'promise you won't make any plans on your actual birthday' and I replied 'yeah I promise, as long as no one dies or anything, I'll keep it free,' and then someone did die.

It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body. My father warned me before the viewing: 'he won't look like a person is supposed to look'. I had read somewhere that when a person is cremated, they make the coffin handles out of wood, that was not the case. This is not about my dead grandfather, but about the things that I remember, and the things that I forget.

A lot of Kiwis wear pounamu necklaces. Pounamu (Greenstone) is a type of jade which is endemic to the South Island of New Zealand, hence the name Te Wai Pounamu. It all belongs to Ngāi Tahu, except for all the many pieces that belong to someone else, except for a piece that until recently belonged to me, still belongs to me, still belongs to Ngāi Tahu. I have lived away from Aotearoa New Zealand since 2010, and the necklace felt doubly like a way of connecting me to my home, and to my family. Living overseas you can always tell that someone is either from Aotearoa, or is close to someone who is, if they are wearing one.

I put things down and immediately forget where they are. Keys, wallet, phone, glasses, anything. If my eye isn't on it, it ceases to exist in my mind. I wish I wasn't like this, this is perhaps the thing about me that I like the least. I know, it should be other things.

A few weekends ago, right before Christmas, I went camping to watch a meteor shower over the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. At some point I must have taken my necklace off. Maybe I put it in my tote bag and then crumpled it up with a foil polaroid packet, thrown in the bin. Maybe I took it off in my sleep and later flung it somewhere when I was packing up my tent. Maybe I put it in my pocket and it slipped out when I was sitting on the ground, hugging my knees to my chest, trying desperately to belie my age, making a face like the power-bottom emoji, looking for the meteor shower on the night of the full moon. I don’t know, but I know when I got back to Sydney the necklace was gone. I don't really miss my granddad, I didn't really know him. But I miss that necklace.

Perhaps I never really learnt object permanence.

Every time I see a rubbish truck I wonder if humans ever really do.

It is strange to feel a sense of grief over a necklace, if that’s what this is. Probably I shouldn't have worn it camping. Probably I should have put it on and never taken it off, as many people I know do with their own. I do not want to wear other jewellery, right now it makes me too sad, and more than that, I am angry with myself for being so careless, if I was as I imagine I was, and I loathe myself. I feel as if I will miss it forever, and certainly it can never be replaced. It could be that once it's been gone and out of sight for long enough I will cease to remember it ever existed. I doubt it, and I don't know if I hope so or not.

I went back to look for it the following day, I drove five hours there and back, racing against the sunset, to scrabble around in the dusk. I did not find it.

I lost this piece of writing while I was writing it. I looked in OneNote and in Obsidian and in my drafts folder and on my ReMarkable and in Google Drive and in my folio and after all that I resigned myself to starting again from scratch, a horrible fate, considering the subject problems I have with memory. I opened an old writing notebook to start again, one I thought I hadn't used since I was drafting State Highway One and there it was, bookmarked with a black ribbon.

I wonder if my brain is just too eager to move on to the next thing. There are fountain pens in my top drawer that I fill and abandon until the ink leaks and dries up and then one day I pick one up, clean it, refill it, and then do it all over again. Management consultants and pyramid scheme salespeople (same/same) will tell you that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I wonder if the opposite is true. What if you don't expect any result at all? What if the doing is the thing? Everything is backed up in the cloud anyway, a digital hoarding disorder , a repository for all the things I might ever read again, but will never know how to look for. 'If only I had that thing,' I will say, 'where has it gone?' On a backup of a backup somewhere, in a folder called 'Old Computer' in a folder called 'Dell Laptop Backup' in a folder called 'Netbook' in a folder called 'Files' saved to a hard drive sitting on a pile of hard drives sitting in a drawer in my home office.

Is this interlinked with my fear of running out, with my obsessive need to be prepared? I keep spare underwear in my work bag, I keep PrEP in my work drawers and at home and in my bag, I have two ReMarkable tablets, one for work and one for home, so I can't forget that either. Maybe everything is connected or maybe I am just trying to draw threads together so it fits nicely into a newsletter narrative.

I saw my grandma when I went home in October last year. She was clearing out a lot of my grandad's old jewellery, planning on giving it all away at the upcoming family Christmas gathering - she gave me an amazonite ring that would look great on me if not for my disproportionately fat fingers, and a silver acrobat that is supposed to be a necklace but would look great as an earring. I considered getting my ear pierced so I could wear it, but I'm right about mid-life crisis age and I don't want to give anyone any ammunition there. There was some pounamu as well, none as nice as the piece I was wearing then, but nice enough. Darker, less intricate, but there, shaped and polished, made by his hands, having likely sat in a box for the better part of twenty-three years. When I told my dad what happened, he said there was still some left, he said he would pick out a piece for me.