I have not seen my glasses for two weeks. They are not in my kitchen. They are not in the bathroom. They are not in the bed. They are not under the bed. They are not on the shelf. They are not under the sofa cushions. They are not at my desk at work. They are not at any other desks at work. They are not at my parents' house or the place where I volunteer. They are not at my boyfriend's house. They are not at the doctor's office. They are not in my mother's car. They have come unstuck in time and space.
They have to be somewhere and yet, somehow, they just aren't.
When I taught English as a foreign language I learned that one of the hardest things to get right as a non-native speaker are prepositions - why "in the morning" but "at night"? Why "on the train" not "in the train"? - but right now I feel like I'm done with prepositions as a general life concept. Once you look on top of a pillowcase and under a pillowcase, and then with only a slight hesitation look in the pillowcase, and then begin to wonder if it would be possible for your glasses to somehow be wrapped around the pillowcase in some four-dimensional manner that you simply can't see, you realise that our perception of physical objects and the relations they have to each other are basically a very complicated way to convince our brains that there is order in the universe and we're not just all hurtling on a big rock towards hell and chaos. In a weird way this might be the most frustrating thing to have happened to me all year, because it should be so simple and yet it isn't. They should be right next to me, or on the counter, or on my bedside table, but they refuse to be there, preferring to taunt me from invisible universes. They appear in my dreams, just out of my reach and inexplicably the size of the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I am the Tantalus of the studio flat.
Please tell me if you find my glasses.
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