Found

You’d lost it and the knowledge prickled and itched like a stitched wound a week old. The tram busy beating the boundaries of its territory, crossing paths with the other trams beating the boundaries of theirs, didn’t care.

But it’s slow rumble and gentle swaying soothed your worried mind. Maybe it was trying to help. Maybe the tram did try to calm you down and bring you focus by imitating a mother’s womb, a mix of tummy rumble with a splay footed, swaying gait? You’d felt your elevated heart rate drop and you started to notice other things. The crazy patterned hosiery on the legs of the girl sitting opposite you, the man beside her, who pulled strange faces as he read his phone. The overheated smell of perfume applied early morning and the spill of hot chips on the tram’s floor. If they cleaned the tram before it is sent out in the morning then who sold – who bought hot chips at 7.00 in the morning?

You looked out the window.  A homeless person slept in the doorway of a department store. Their bedding was an impossible white on the pavement. You thought that the homeless look like the badly swaddled newborns of an uncaring giant mother, left to squawk for food.

Lost.

Don’t end up there.

 Of all the things valuable, your front, your fuck you front, was the most important. And now it was gone.

Lost and found, they’re opposites right? But that doesn’t mean everything that was lost can be, will be found. You thought about your virginity. It was lost and won’t be found again. Or would it. You wondered if even now it is there, buried in sand in the dune where it was lost one summer night. Maybe it could be found in the future. Would some archaeologist find it in a thousand years, sift the sand through a sieve until there it was, there alone on the mesh?

What would it look like? You just knew that it would reflect light, but what shape would a virginity be?

You realised you had been grinning and mumbling to yourself about losing your virginity. Thinking about it like it was a physical thing. That must have looked really weird. You looked up then and the girl with the elaborately patterned tights quickly looked from your face down to the tram’s floor. You have read somewhere that very intelligent people often talked to themselves which reassured you because then, right then, you felt scared.

And then you noticed that the man beside the girl, the man who had pulled funny faces as he read his phone was gone. He had got off the tram and you hadn’t noticed, and now there was a different person sitting there. But before you could look at them your mind reminded you not to miss your stop. So, chest tight, you turned to the window to see where the tram was, where you were, but it was ok. There was still a few more stops to go.

You sighed with relief and turned back to look at the new person beside the girl and the new person was you. Well not exactly you, but someone just like you. Someone who by just being themselves felt just as out of place as you did. You could tell. So you smiled at them. They were distracted, anxious just like you, so they didn’t see you at first looking at them, with the smile like an inverted coat hanger frozen on your face. Then, just when you thought how stupid you were behaving, they looked up from the screen where their long fingers with short nails tipped in immaculate black polish tapped. They caught your smile.

For a few seconds you could see them look and think and make up their minds then they smiled too and said, “Sacha.”

They put out their hand and shocked as you were, you took its dry warmth in your own sweaty clasp, and then embarrassed you almost dropped it. But in the last millisecond you thought NO, and just held it, and then remembered to say, “I’m Lucas,” before you let it go.

“Crowded trams are tough, aren’t they,” Sacha said then and you nodded and they joined in and both of you nodded together like a pair of dashboard ornaments.

All of a sudden you said, “I find you have to get up and dress and leave, no thought, just force yourself on to the tram when it comes. But I can’t always do it. Sometimes I can’t, then I have to catch an Uber to work which means that whole day I work for fucking nothing because of how expensive the Uber was.”

You had been waiting to say that for a long time.

Sacha said, “That sucks. Sometimes my brother drives me but when he has the day off I catch the tram.”

Then the girl with the tights, who now seemed reluctant to leave because she had been listening, got off at a stop. It was your stop next. So, a bit sad you stood up, you got up to go, and that was when Sacha reached out with a fist and said, “Put out your hand.”

So you did, and they opened their hand above your palm and nothing came out. Not a lolly or money or anything but for a second your palm felt a weight.

“What did you just give me?” you asked.

Sacha looked serious and then smiled, “Your courage. I found it on the seat where you must have dropped it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

You wanted to cry but you held it back until after you said goodbye and that they would see you tomorrow.

Found. You stepped off the tram. You cried the two blocks to work but smiled the whole day there.

Photo by Daniel Pelaez Duque on Unsplash