Last week I walked into the ARKET store on Oxford Circus and lost my phone, about two minutes after telling myself not to put my phone in the silly shallow pocket of my leather coat. Anyway, it was gone. It was a long time since I’d broken or lost a phone. Once I lost or broke three in six months, but that was nine, ten, years ago, in my mid-twenties.
The Apple store is right across the road from ARKET and so I ran in and begged for help, locked my phone immediately. It was already offline on Find my iPhone. I had to go to a meeting right after, but luckily I knew the way there by foot. Still, emerging back onto Regent Street, I felt bewildered. The whole time I walked to the meeting I kept patting down my bag, my pocket.
To get home I would have to walk several more miles, but a kind bus driver allowed me to get on for free. When I got in, my phone was visible once more on Find My iPhone. It was still on Regent Street, though a little distance away from where I last had it. I updated the Lost message to show my boyfriend’s number. And – a miracle – somebody rang it. My phone was in a shirt shop, though its journey there will always be a mystery.
Time is going quickly. London is beautiful this year, one of the more beautiful springs I can remember. It makes me think about how every summer will take me further away from a specific version of myself, one I can’t seem to stop clinging onto.
But so we go. I drink lemon thyme and rhubarb soda in the sun and make affogato in the afternoon. In the early morning I scope out elderflower on the marshes, feeling photosynthesised. It’s time to renew my passport, so I pick a face for the next decade, official until I turn 46.
There was such an abundance of time at 26. I experienced my happiness freely and unselfconsciously. Now when I feel happy I think, with trepidation and excitement, oh my god, am I feeling happy? Actually feeling happy? And then I think am I as happy as when XX? And like this, attempting to quantify, it slips from my grasp. Is to categorise happiness, to compare it, to scare it away?
It seems churlish to quibble over happiness’s contours, its levels and intensity. I’m safe and loved and only sometimes at the mercy of the void’s gaping maw. When I am happy, lately, it feels smooth. It comes from the feel of the sun on my skin, from the happiness of work, a sighting of ducklings on the Lea, a conversation with a friend. It’s not drenched in electric, it doesn’t make my skin thrill or my step quicken, but it’s more sustainable.
The sunlight inspires vivid memories of sitting on the pavement in Hackney Wick, about to go dancing, the early evening light golden. We used to pre-drink at my house and walk through a nearby park which had mini trampolines, and we would jump on them with our cans in our hands. The night stretched out ahead of us. The night! And that was happiness simple and unassailable. One of the multiple times I lost my phone was on one of those evenings, but I shrugged it off and walked to Victoria Park to watch the sunrise, fell asleep in a child’s play area, and woke up to a concerned father and small boy peering at me. I used to do things like that.
It was from Hackney Wick that I embarked on the journey to pick up my phone from the shirt shop. First I had to go to a seven am yoga class, which I hadn’t been able to cancel without my phone. Without my phone I also couldn’t hire a bike to cycle there. I decided to just walk but felt immediately bewildered, the same way I had felt the day before.
And I realised it was because by losing my phone I’d also lost my grip on time, a tight grip I didn’t even know I had or valued. When I thought about losing my phone I thought about the inconvenience of not having my bank cards, of not being able to talk to people, but I hadn’t thought about how it would affect my ability to coordinate my day, minute to minute. Without being able to pace myself, to trust my own new perception of unmoored time, I just got the overground instead, power-walking at the other end, and I was twenty minutes early, but I didn’t know I was, I couldn’t be sure until the moment of arrival.
But once I’d made my peace with sloshing around in time, things became more pleasant. I had to get to the shirt shop for ten, when it opened. That gave me two soft, offline, hours to get there from Hackney. And so I walked along the canal for a while. I saw what I think were globe artichokes, flourishing in a little patch of scrub by the side of the path, but I couldn’t look it up on my phone and confirm. There were flowers everywhere. Sweet ducks, funny names of boats, smiling people. It smelled very good. I felt as if I had been given permission to go slowly. I got slightly lost, and as I enjoyed being lost I felt that I didn’t want to actually get my phone back, yet, but as it turns out I was waiting on an important call, the kind of call that might have separated my life into before and after. The kind of call that splits time. But urgency was deferred until the opening of the shop, so I had been granted some kind of grace from temporal inevitability, from the rest of the day’s obligations. I’m helpless! I told the universe, with some relief.
I was ten minutes early to the shop. I opened the door and was waved away. I walked up and down Regent Street for a bit, hovered outside ARKET, as if I could figure out what had happened. But it didn’t matter any more. When the shirt shop did open, everyone there was really happy for me. Sometimes we can all do with a little miracle.
The call came, and all was well. No before, no after. Time restored. Within an hour, I’d almost forgotten my phone had gone missing at all.
What a lovely story! I ditched my phone 9 years ago, and my wife and I share one, using it as a hardwired computer for chat etc when needed. Life doesn't get more "convenient" when we lose a phone, life improves without a cell phone!
These glimpses of your lovely life and time are a postcard from another reality full of peace and possibility.