You hunch over the keyboard and lay out what you think is a pretty compelling scenario. Then when you're done, you look back over what you've said a day or two later and something's missing. The insights have mysteriously seeped down below the surface of the page and disappeared like invisible ink. You crumple up the page and begin again. But wait, there was maybe something useful in that earlier version so you go back into the wastebasket and start scavenging through a pile of crumpled up notes to retrieve the part that made sense. That hinted at some version of the truth. It's nowhere to be found. Or could that sentence be salvaged? Your words are foreign to you. This leads you further back to trace the source of the wrong turn you made. Sometimes writing feels like this. An endless scavenger hunt for objects that may have already been removed.

I got lost while driving the other day and when my phone's GPS wouldn't engage I felt the slightest twinge of reflexive panic rising up in my chest even though I wasn't that far from home. So then, instead of heading deeper into my mistake I reversed course until I was back where I had started, That rewinding of your forward trajectory to the origin of your mistake is oddly satisfying. Like pressing the rewind button in real life. As if your wheels are the spools of a video cassette.  I do the same thing in my mind by examining the crucial points in my life when I could have taken a different fork in the road. This is sometimes less gratifying.

Being lost and losing things seems to be a prevalent theme for me in these soft, humid August days. I hate misplacing objects. A pair of sunglasses I was fond of seems to have disappeared on the short walk from my front door to my driveway and no amount of retracing of steps would retrieve them. The classic question, "Where was the last place you saw it?" can serve as a wistful reminder of loss instead of a useful retrieval technique when it fails to yield results. And this week a similar thing happened with a glass straw I've been using to drink my daily iced coffees with. Again the list of potential hiding places for it was extremely small. Things disappear all the time with and without explanation. When they seem to vanish before your eyes I imagine the transporter room on the old Star Trek reconverting matter as it teleports it from one location to another. Maybe somewhere in a shadow dimension are all the lost objects of this place waiting to be reclaimed...the homemade scarf my wife knitted for me that I carelessly left near Bryant Park... the precious black Egyptian backgammon tokens  my brother lost at the beach in Cape Cod that had to be replaced by cheap plastic checker pieces...the classic hand-knit soft woolen sweater my dad brought over from Germany with him on the boat that was passed down from brother to brother and looked good on everyone...But I think I'm digressing. I've lost the original thread somewhere. But don't worry I'll find it eventually...

I'm a person who gets lost a lot and have a horrible sense of direction that I inherited from my mother. My father on the other hand had a brain like a Google map. He would remember how to get to out-of-the-way soccer fields in distant municipalities years later. It's a joke now between me and my wife that whichever way I turn coming out of a cafe or restaurant will be the wrong one, so we just have to go in the opposite direction. I carry a broken compass in my brain. The capacity to get lost carries over into my dreaming life too. (Apparently this is a common enough condition to be an answer on a NY Times questionnaire about dreams.) My dream self always seems to be in a hazy parallel universe trying to figure out an unfamiliar transit system or navigate a strange roadway in an attempt to get back to a home, which when I reach it, is itself unrecognizable. 

But to get back to that original thread about getting lost in a thicket of words, it seems like that's sometimes a necessary part of the process. When I was younger and my dark moods overtook me I would purposefully try to lose myself by driving into an unknown part of the city where no one knew me. I would find an obscure diner or bar and burrow deep into the folds of its anonymity. Usually this helped a little and eventually, after I had dug a deep enough hole to hide in, I'd start to crave human company and familiarity again. My cat Ophelia did a version of this, too, disappearing for hours at a time to have her alone time and sometimes not reappearing even when my calls for her became increasingly desperate. Once I spent two hours in a Montreal snowstorm searching for her only to find out that she  had never left the apartment and had been expertly hiding under a La-Z- Boy recliner the whole time, nestled comfortably as I navigated snow drifts shaking a package of her favorite cat treats. 

It seems as if my writing needs to go down lots of cul-de sacs (obviously) before finding a road that leads somewhere. It reminds me of a technique an acting teacher  had for helping us find the right line reading.  He would instruct us to purposefully deliver lines in a way that we knew were wide of the mark tonally -  too little or too much - to help define where 'just right' was. Writers I like say that they have a fairly strong idea of where they want to end up but don't define their path to get there too narrowly. Leaving room to meander into uncharted territory is always a good idea as long as you don't become irretrievably lost and know how to get back home eventually. As a child I remember getting separated from my older sister and her friend in the shopping mall and feeling absolutely bereft. If I had kept my wits about me I would have realized that I could easily have walked home, but children until a certain age live without a certain layer of resiliency that comes later. Until we have developed a strong enough sense of self we feel as if we can be blown into the wilderness at the whim of circumstances. As an adult I once took a local bus to a flea market on the outskirts of Budapest and once there got turned around and completely lost track of where I was. In the era before cellphones in a place where no one spoke English I felt as if I was briefly marooned on a distant island. But now, equipped with a lifetime of resources I eventually figured out how to get back to where I had started. That childhood feeling of being abandoned has all but disappeared but not completely. I think it exists somewhere inside us all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZw23sWlyG0