I was the girl who sat in the Lost and Found Box, fingers intertwined in the laces of a stray shoe.
I’d fiddle with those little plastic things at the ends for hours, staring at the clouds for what seemed like forever.
Sometimes I’d put on a sweatshirt or two if it got cold, but most often I left the items for their rightful owners.?
Life was…well, it wasn’t good, but I guess it wasn’t bad either.
The things in the Lost and Found were beat up, bruised, washed out, tired.
But I was sort of that way too.
All the people who came to the Lost and Found were tired in a sort of beat up way.
It was as if by coming, they admitted defeat to themselves, admitted that they had completely lost something.

But that was okay.

People lost things all the time.
It was just that… people tended to find things a lot less often. ?
The small box sitting outside the school office was cold and wet, often times sporting some sort of moldy food at the bottom.
But I sat there after school in the box, handing people their lost items.
More often than not, I’d hand people objects that weren’t theirs; that they simply needed for the day.
And at the end of the day, the books would get lost all over again and end up with me.
But it gave the items a home… at least temporarily.

And everything needed a home.

Lost items had a home.
Found items had a home.
Wandering teenagers forgot what a home was.?
They forgot what it meant to belong. ?
I guess my home was the Lost and Found; where I was never quite lost, never quite found.
I belonged with… the math book on my left?

I’d never really liked math.

But it was my home.
It was our home.
Home to me and all the lost items of the school; where things were lost and never found.
?Someone picked up the math book yesterday.
It never got returned, so perhaps it found a home.
Perhaps some student thought to themselves that it might be good to get ahead in the class.
Who am I kidding?
Some person just needed a new one after they’d lost their own. ?
But that was the way of life in the Lost and Found. Something got lost and something else got found.
?I was the girl who sat in the Lost and Found for hours, the only thing in there that would never get found.

After all, people never search for something they don’t know they’ve lost.