Somewhere in the universe, there is a place where all the lost things go. I don’t know where it is, but I like to think about it. Like there’s an infinite junk drawer filled with orphaned socks, misplaced house keys, childhood toys, and friendships that faded without a fight. I like to imagine that my favorite stuffed giraffe, the one with the tattered neck and the inexplicable smell of peanut butter, is sitting there on some shelf, waiting.  

Loss is inevitable. We lose things constantly; physical objects, sure, but also time, people, versions of ourselves we barely had the chance to know. And despite what motivational posters claim, not everything lost is meant to be found. Some things simply disappear, and we are left with the echoes they leave behind.  

I think about the way lost things haunt us, not necessarily in a spooky, ghost-story way, but in the way a half-remembered song lingers in the back of your mind, the lyrics just out of reach. I still dream about the friends I had when I was twelve, the ones who felt as permanent as the sky, even though I can’t remember the last words we ever said to each other. I think about the books I never returned to the library, the New Year’s resolutions I forgot by February, the afternoons that felt like they would stretch on forever but somehow slipped away.  

Loss is not always loud. More often than not, it is quiet. One day you are playing in the backyard, convinced you will never grow up, and the next, you realize you can’t remember the last time you even sat outside. One day you text someone every morning, and the next, you realize you haven’t spoken in years. The drift is subtle, and by the time you notice, it’s already too late.  

And yet, maybe there is something beautiful in this. Maybe the act of losing reminds us that we had something worth missing in the first place. Maybe the absence of a thing gives it weight, a kind of immortality that presence never could. After all, I have long since stopped holding my childhood stuffy, but in my mind, he is still there, as soft and peanut-butter-scented as ever.  

I don’t know where lost things go, but I do know this: they don’t really leave us. Not entirely. They exist in the spaces they once occupied, in the memories they left behind, in the quiet moments when we realize we are who we are because of all we have held and all we have let go.