I have a horror of losing things:  socks, my shopping list, earrings, precious objects of all sorts, and definitely thoughts.  When the thing is not immediately found, I panic and becoming the proverbial chicken, you know, the one with its head cut off? It's like other phobias, only it it lossaphobia.

The earliest memory of such loss occurred when I was under 5 years old and had been playing with a neighbor girl when my favorite doll went missing. At the time I blamed her. I cried and cried with the loss of that doll and was evermore suspicious of the friend, guarding my things carefully when she came over.  But nothing else disappeared when she was around, and with time and more losses I came to wonder if there might be a special place where lost things go, and imagined that place must exert a magnetic force like gravity for its collecting.

That first lost doll had been given to me by my beloved grandmother.  As the years rolled by she gave me other things,and most of them went the way of the first gift--to the collection.; a trunk of antique doll clothes, her mother's ring, her cameo broach, a lace mantilla my grandfather had brought from Spain.  There were a whole string of losses leading up to the big one; the loss of Grandmother.  Had each object been an early warning of what was to come? Did they prepare me for her death?

In my mind all the losses, including the person I loved, live together in a place that I now understand is where the lost things go; to a part of my brain that will always treasure them.  Would I love the doll as much as I do now if I had never lost it?  The trunk of doll clothes has been filled out in my imagination on the manyoccasions when I've remembered and expanded on its contents in an attempt to recall what had been there.

The lost shopping list or lost thought or other such things are not so precious so they probably do disappear entirely, although according to physics theory nothing that ever was can not be.  The list will have been transformed into atoms that become stars.  I do wonder though where words go since they aren't physical but do have weight.  A question for another blog.

Having diagnosed my phobia, I do feel a bit calmer, though I doubt it will change my reaction when the next one comes along and is grabbed from my reality and sent to an alternative universe.