Ninespace

Things in Ninespace disappear.  Keys, glasses, phone, wallet, watch, books, tickets, puzzle pieces.  "But I had it in my hand," I wail, and havoc frantically.  Often whatever it is turns up somewhere like my bathrobe pocket—why?  Or nowhere.  Or is folded in a space-time wrinkle.  I once lost my beloved old wheelie iPod for like a year.  I could have sworn I dropped it on a walk in the Yard.  Rewalked where I'd been, reported it, replaced it sorrowfully—and then it turned up in the toe of one best shoe, under the bed. Couldn't find the other shoe, of course...

Then there was the time I had a taxi to the airport waiting, and I couldn't find my keys.  Can't go abroad and leave the door unlocked.  So I havocked all my pockets and my bags, unzipping, scrabbling, burrowing—and realized I had the keys, clenched firmly in my teeth.

You can't make this stuff up.

So I've been looking for my keys for days now.  I had them in my hand.  (These days, my teeth are masked.)  I'd long since given up on my new, very expensively engineered prismatic glasses, which I swear I'd lost either in a snowbank or the back of a car just before the first lockdown in March.  No, they can't just be reordered.  They took several fittings in a basement office a longish bus ride away, because if the line of the prism falls in the wrong place, they're worse than useless.  On the first attempt, the lensmakers put it in upside down.  Now that was weird.

So, all through the pandemic, I've been making do with my faithful old reading glasses and for distances, a series of older and older pairs of spectacles, each scratchier and crookeder and wobblier than the last.  They don't much help with my wonky vision. They fall off if I look down.  And as a mask with a nose wire and ear hooks feels a lot like metal-framed glasses, I don't sense when they're on my face, so I don't know when they've dropped off.  This makes looking for things even harder.

Late last night, I had yet another hunt for the keys, scrabbling under seat cushions, moving furniture, shifting piles of stuff.  I shone my flashlight under the blue armchair—and the long-lost glasses winked back.

Damn it all, I've vacuumed under that chair.  The glasses must have been swept along in the skirt of it, each time I shoved it back.  Or else they've been scuttling around the apartment on their little wire legs, hiding and giggling.

Bemusedly, I put them on and went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea.  And there were the keys, lying baldly on the floor and winking, right in front of the fridge.  They can't have been there all this time.  I mean I stand there, how many times a day?  Often in my stocking feet.  How could I not have stepped right on them?  Had I shelved them in the butter thingy, in a fit of abstraction, and they'd tumbled out?

Wait, were they invisible until I put the magic glasses on?

Ninespace is the Twilight Zone.

Nine