Crimed Tries to Master the Art of Losing

Elizabeth Bishop, one of my favorite poets, wrote a poem which has been my lesson for the summer. It's called, "One Art," and in it the speaker learns to accept the lack of control, the randomness of Fate, the pain, which all accompany loss. It reads,

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

My summer began with what was, to me, disaster. I moved into a quaint (read slummy) apartment in Somerville with a great friend of mine. Another friend, and my roommate for next year, was yet to come, so the two of us had the place to ourselves. Excepting the former tenant. A grad student at Harvard with a penchant for the bizarre, the psychedelic and the pornographic, she deserves a full essay dedicated solely to her. She stayed with us for the first few nights we lived at 386 B Washington St. #2, packing her stuff to take a long needed sabbatical to her home in New York City. My bedroom for the summer was to be her former workspace with her desk and dresser and chair taking up most of the room. I close the room because one wall is an enormous bay window, which, despite the traffic noise, lets in a lot of light. I moved my stuff into a corner while she tried to unload drawers and cram the contents into boxes and bags.

That night my roommate Michael noticed his toothbrush was missing. Very politely he asked the tenant if she had mistakenly taken it. She said she didn't think so.

Two days later I realized I had lost some things, too. My black leather backpack which my friend Martin threw up on a week after my mom bought it for me, was gone. Inside it had been my black leather address book, my black leather cuticle set and a pair of engraved scissors.

They were all presents from my mother. I was panicked. I spent the time before falling asleep and the hypnogogic state before waking retracing where I had been in the days before my things disappeared. Not only were they all terribly expensive, but I had a sentimental attachment to them as well. (People who know me will not find that unusual. I become attached to the weirdest items because they remind me of people I have known or places I've been. I broke into tears while packing in the spring over a bottle I had found at the bottom of Walden Pond. It marked the first time I went skinny-dipping there. My friends declared, "There was a reason it was on the bottom of Walden Pond, it's worthless!"). It took me two weeks to tell my mom about the bag. She took it pretty well, I'd say. To this day I honestly have no idea where it is. Perhaps the tenant accidently packed it away with her stuff and hasn't found it yet.

Since that first week of summer, I've lost tings, forgotten them places or damaged borrowed goods, sometimes a combination of the three. I borrowed a pair of pants from my new-tooth-brush-toting roommate Michael. It was his birthday and I wanted to look nice for the surprise party being thrown in his honor. At the end of the night, drunk out of my mind on Sangria, I sat on a banana. While reveling in the fact, chair dancing and smooshing it everywhere, Michael looked at me and said, "Bill, aren't those my pants you're wearing?" I looked at him, motionless. Silence. Then I began my little jig again. The pants are still lying in my room. Every detergent I've tried hasn't gotten the banana stain out. They should make a laundry detergent commercial about that.

I forgot a hat I borrowed in a movie theater located in the middle of nowhere. I had to interupt my post-movie reveling by calling the place and begging them to hold onto it for me. It was also Michael's hat.--He's still my friend.

I misplaced a credit card my mother sent me last month. I've searched everywhere but I can't find it anywhere. I still haven't gotten the nerve to tell her. I mean, I know it's here somewhere.

I have yet to figure out what all of this means. Perhaps I'm not supposed to be as attached to material possessions. Perhaps I'm supposed to realize the ephemerality of this life. Perhaps I'm supposed to master the art of losing, but it's so goddamn hard to do.

I've taken a series of self-portraits this summer. Maybe I have a fear of losing myself. Or of losing my childhood, which I think is what a lot of this means.

I wrote a letter to my mother a couple of weeks ago, but never posted it. In it I wrote to her about the struggles we have both been through and how we will forever be in touch, if not in person, in spirit.

I told her how I lost Harvard this summer. One day while walking down Quincy St., I looked up and realized, "Hey, this place isn't all it's cracked up to be." For three years I have walked around feeling like an alien here and being awestruck by the architecture and grandeur of this place. I've been intrigued by the little old men who walk around here dressed like they're going out for a day in the country with their straw hats and seersucker suits. You know the ones I'm talking about. They often have moustaches, little rimless glasses and carry a cane. Bowties are their specialty. But this summer I began to put all of this into perspective. As I contemplate whether or not to write a thesis next year, I realize I have to do it for myself, not because this is Harvard and writing a thesis is what's expected. I'm also preparing myself emotionally to leave after next year. I have finally seen the bubble which surrounds Harvard.

It's like freshman year when I saw the bubble which surrounds my parents. It's a bubble of limitation, of boundaries, it's seeing my parents and Harvard for what I've always imagined them to be. I'm slowly seeing the world for what it is.

I turned 21 this summer, and I have a right to go anywhere. But just as quickly as the window of opportunity opens, it shuts. But I shut it under my own volition. I'm not ready yet. It's going to take a little bit longer for me to fly. So in the end, I guess I'm learning how to lose my childhood. I have stepped over the threshold from Blake's "Innocence" to his "Songs of Experience." Just give me a little time to get comfortable, then I'll really show you what I've got to offer.

P.S. --I lost a pack of cigarettes today, about 2:45 this afternoon. Camel Lights, Hard Pack. If anyone finds a pack with only one cigarette missing, none of them turned upside down, kindly return them to The Harvard Crimson, 14 Plympton Street, c/0 Loser. My health-nut friends, and maybe Elizabeth Bishop, would say it's a sign.