“Until We’re Lost” by Danielle Bukowski

It takes a solid five minutes to drag my group of friends through the crowd, using my elbow as a wedge to pry apart other bodies, stepping over shoes to have to rub my legging-clad thighs against other people’s thighs. We had clasped wrists to form a chain and when we finally reach a table, our torsos torqued at awkward angles to try and fit our bodies into spaces too small for so many of us, I realize that my hat is gone.

I don’t like losing things. In fact, I panic, whenever I lose any object. It only lasts a few minutes. So as I pat my coat and check the floor and my head and my pockets and pat my coat again, panic spreads from my chest to numb my hands despite the aggressive heat of the room. Suddenly claustrophobic, I need to get outside. But I also need to find my hat.

“I lost my hat,” I shout at my friends, and turn around quickly so they can’t tell that I’m upset.

“Maybe someone tossed it up on the bar,” a friend shouts languidly.

I try to return back to the bar from the path we took but it is blocked by so many more bodies than before. I take a longer route, cutting through the bathroom line and stepping up and over a chair. I push against heavy-coated backs with my best helpless-girl “excuse me” voice to get to the long counter of a bar. By this point I can’t see people clearly for the pounding beneath my eyes.

As I blindly push forward to look at the bar, catty voices insult me for trying to cut through their bartender-attention line. I abandon my counter-sweep and train my eyes to the floor, searching for a flash of red beneath snowy boots and heels better suited to Miami than upstate New York.

It is gone. I push back to my friends, not bothering with the excuse-me’s this time, and abruptly announce that I am leaving. In their third-drink states they register this slowly, assuming I’ve been invited to another party.

“If you see my hat, please let me know.”

“Ok,” they shout back.

When I was young I worried about the fallen leaves. Where would they go when the winter came? I knew that they fell, then snow fell, and then the spring rose up with new leaves. But the old leaves were the ones I worried about. Rational mother tried to explain that they would be taken away and pulverized into fertilizer, to nourish new buds, but that only caused me to panic more. I had to save them. They would die unless I saved them all. I ran around the backyard in scatterbrained circles of terror, gathering up every red and orange and burnt-yellow-brown leaf on the lawn, bundling the stems into frantic bouquets until my tiny fingers could stuff no more beneath their creases.

I took them inside and carefully pressed each one within the pages of stacked coffee-table books before transferring them to a special pressed-flower book. They were neither dead nor alive, a limbo in wax paper.

Five minutes after leaving the bar my panic has subsided. I remind myself that losing the hat was just an accident, a mistake without fault; not every object and friend and lover that has left is gone because I was not good enough. Her running off shortly after I stopped calling on Friday nights wasn’t causation or correlation, as they told me repeatedly over the phone. Sometimes, things just need to leave. I regret the fact that I will have to tell my therapist about this incident.

My grandmother had knit the hat for me.

She’s still alive, and could easily knit me another one. If I brought her the skeins of yarn she’d have a hat back to me in a week, maybe sooner if she knew that I’d been walking around campus with my hair out in the cold because I lost my hat. Her hat.

Mine no more.

At this point I realize that I, too, am lost, and curse myself for walking into such a dumb cliché. I consider walking around aimlessly until I collapse on the streets of whatever town is next to this one, miles from home, exhausted. I imagine a confused paper delivery boy finding my chattering bones in the morning.

And then I take out my iPhone and plot a route back to my dorm.

By the time I return my jaw aches with the cold. My scalp tingles as I walk into the heated entranceway and I regret how short I’d cut it, in an evening of drunken hysteria, when they called to tell me they didn’t know where she’d gone but that she’d been gone for days. I stand in the lobby for a moment with my hands over my ears until I can feel them returning rosily to life, then start up the stairs.

I was teased, the autumn that I was compelled to save the leaves. But I was teased most autumns and the other seasons besides. By the next November I had forgotten about the incident, and it was bookmarked by my parents as the humorous precursor to my community service work, the “touchy-feely” classes I took in college. When she was a kid she even tried to save the leaves!

I turned the saved leaves into a Martha Stewart-worthy wreath that still hangs beneath glass in my parent’s living room. When visitors admire it I feel ashamed.

Once, she had sent me a link to a similar wreath in an artsy DIY blog, and I told her I could make her a better one. I wish now that I actually had.

By the fifth flight of stairs I am fully warmed. Maybe instead of watching TV until I pass out I’ll try to teach myself how to knit—a friend down the hall has needles and yarn. I could make myself a new hat and it would truly be mine. At the very least I promise myself a reward of microwaved mac-and-cheese and some time spent with my aching head beneath a pillow. My hallway is littered with party debris and I groan when I notice that something is stuck on my doorknob.

Although partially flattened by a muddy boot, my hat hangs snuggly from the knob like a cradle.

Danielle Bukowski is not related to Charles but has many other odd relatives if you’d like to hear about them. A reader, writer, and unreliable narrator, Danielle is a Vassar grad living in New York City.