THINGS

So, the hope is growing dim that I will ever be reunited with my passport. I mailed it on March 2, 2015, certified mail to the US Passport center with a check and application for more pages to be added, because there was only one and a half blank spaces for stamps and visas left. Over the weekend, I received in the mail from the US Postal Service's "loose articles unit" the check I had put in with the passport, returned to me because it had been separated from its original envelope and it had my address on it.

So, this is obviously extremely, extremely bad news. I called the official Passport information hotline on the Monday morning-- apparently a very busy time so I was on hold, then spoken to and transferred, which bumped me back to the back of the line on hold, and was eventually told that I could do nothing but wait and hope the passport was still in the envelope that (certified mail confirmed) had arrived at the designated address. That there was no one I could call, no line to the place where it might or might not arrive, no way even to direct call back to the person I was talking to (even though I'd had to be transferred from the main hotline and wait on hold twice for a combined span of 20+ minutes). Oh, and also that if the passport HAD fallen out and was turned in to the address advertised for lost passports that it would be automatically destroyed and I wouldn't even be told one way or the other; the only hope for it to get back to me at all was if it was miraculously inside the envelope.

A week later I called again. The passport was not in the system and I was told again that it would be destroyed if not found with the original packaging. I was told to keep on waiting and maybe something would happen.

Now, maybe now is the time to stop and talk a bit about me and about my relationship to things. I really love things. All of you who've been in my house can attest: I love things. I have deep and fulfilling love and bonds with things. I am aware that loving things can be problematic. I am actively working to refine my relations with things. I want to be attached to fewer things, I want to be less devastated by the loss or destruction of things and therefore able to live happily (or even more happily) with fewer things. But those aspirations are no balm at all to the sudden, unexpected, and undeserved loss of one of my most treasured things. The thing that holds the purest physical distillations of my last five years-- of experiences, of challenges, of money and time expended. There were some visas from 2010 and my first dissertation research trip, 2011 Japan, but the ones that are haunting me are of course my Japanese "Cultural Activities" visa for Midorikai. It's shiny and there's a black and white photo of me looking kind've rockabilly goth with black black hair and blunt extra short bangs. Then there's the UK work visa, in undulating pastels, sort of fuzzed out, like the consulate prints their visas on ink jet printers with a silver hologram shot through them and I look a little mussed, like I'd been painting with my hair in a ponytail before heading off for the picture. And the trouble that visa took. The incredible labyrinth of red tape and confusing directions. Remember, I was 99th percentile on the verbal portion of the GRE. Twice. And I could barely decipher what the UK visa service wanted from me in order to secure a visa and I almost didn't get it due to not having one ambiguously named document printed out when I went for the fingerprint, etc appointment. I remember wondering, what on earth do people without extraordinary English abilities do? Is that intentional?

Those two years in Japan and London were hard. And wonderful. I feel proud of myself that I achieved those things, and losing the physical passport that holds those emblems of that time does not erase those years and those achievements and those challenges, but conversely, nothing distilled all those feelings about those undertakings more than holding my passport in my hands and looking at those inert bureaucratic stickers. Plus my Chinese visa, plus pages of European Union journeys to Poland, Finland, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Poland, Iceland.

I scoured my possessions for pictures-- after all, I usually try to photocopy the visa and picture pages for just such an eventuality as losing my passport, but I guess I'd been a bit complacent. As soon as the routine process of mailing the application and passport transformed into the unforeseen disaster of the US postal service ripping open the envelope and losing it, all kinds of things seemed to be obvious musts that I hadn't done: wrap the thing in heavy cardboard and mail it, scan every page before mailing it, send it by a higher priority method, check the penciled in address and make sure it's your current one (I have no idea what it is. Is it London? Might someone mail it back to a house where a neighbour consistently stole or destroyed my mail and I have no way of getting to it? Great.)

I have two photocopied pages and one photographed one. My picture page, my British visa and my Chinese visa.

I don't currently know of any copies of my Japanese visa or any of the minor other pages. Looking at these pictures feels a bit like (I imagine) methadone would. It touches the place that is hurting for my passport, my passport as a fetish or an amulet--some magical thing that holds, like the Tardis, much more than it appears to. These pictures touch that place, but only to tickle it, only to remind me of the fundamental absence of the physical thing. The thing I can perfectly well live without, that I can replace, that does not in fact constitute any of the important things about my last five years, but that nonetheless has so perfectly encapsulated them that I feel its loss like an amputation.

[For the critical theorists: is this Derridean supplementarity? I am not used to thinking of Derrida with deep, wrenching emotion. What is the emotional heft of supplément?]

Acceptance has come and gone in waves. At first, overwhelmed with should-haves, with the bewilderment of trying to figure out what to do, what can't be done, the thought of it fills me, intruding over and over again into the rest of the day. I tell myself all kinds of tough-love truisms that don't ever shake me out of the unhappiness. Things like, "think of people who suddenly lose a WHOLE PERSON-- like flight 370. Your passport is nothing like that." It's just a thing, you have too many things anyway. At least you didn't lose it WHILE TRAVELING-- you don't even have tickets to leave the country right now, so there's no additional pressure to replace it or hassle. Part of me fights back with equally silly things: like that I have every other passport I've ever had, so now the collection is incomplete (this is also exactly how I felt when I was despondent as a 13 year old with my first cavity: my perfect record ruined, damaged goods.) Or the fact that I was absurdly pleased with my ten year dates of expiration: 2000, 2010, this one was set to be renewed in 2020. Then rational, suck-it-up me responds well, you're in the second best possible year to replace it, nice round 2015, 2025, from here on.

Then, I become a bit resigned. For a few days, it doesn't take over my thoughts so forcefully, it doesn't seem like such a big deal. Then this morning I wake up way too early, I think with the vestiges of a dream that it was, against all odds, coming back to me, and I can't get back to sleep, so here I am, writing it all out-- something that actually was one of my first impulses upon realizing it was probably gone: find all the pictures of it, write it out, draw all the pages you remember from memory, make it into a pathetic little replacement book, a mimetic talisman that knows there's no replacing the treasure, but that believes in the power of a pacifier --- or actually, more accurately: someone who believes in archives, who treasures documentation, and who already knows that the archive is already full of poor copies, surrogates that can't replace the lost thing but that nonetheless accomplish something. It's a surrogate that sometimes feels sadder than an absence, but it's something.