YOUR TURN. What Have You Lost?

An egret taking flight over Mittry Lake, an oasis north of Yuma, Arizona. March 2021. Not sure who the little guy in the water is.

A ring, a painting, a car, and a family are among the things that might be lost to the precariousness of youth in today’s list story. There is also, mercifully, something of what might be found once more.

But first. You voted. For third Saturday posts in the near future, write-along prompts rose to the top. I’m glad they did. Your shares on the vehicles you’ve named were gold. I once received a philodendron, Isabella, as a housewarming gift. Her heart-shaped leaves dipped demurely just below the pot’s edge. By the time I passed her on to the friend who was taking over my lease two apartments later, she was magnificent, her vines curling around the kitchen, spilling into the ivory rays that streamed in through the window over the sink and trailing to the floor toward the entranceway. It was like that. One day, just my three. Soon, a forest of named vehicles—possessed Christine; the circus car Sassy Sally the Blue Sensation; Larry the Lariat; Casper and his headmaster, Dash; the Hotel Mandarin Sunshine, Gretchen when she got ornery; purple Ophelia and shiny, handsome Bruce Willis; Blue Wing, the 36-foot sloop, and her dinghy, Little Willie John, who once slid through desolate shallows in the Bahamas—to name a few.

Today’s prompt: Things lost

A note before I share mine—maybe skip this list if you’re my sweet mama (or anyone who prefers not to know details of my sex life):

• When I was fifteen, my boyfriend gave me a ring shaped like a heart. When it was time for me to practice the piano, he’d call. I’d stretch the phone cord and lay the receiver on the lid, keeping the line busy a full hour if I could get away with it. The silver heart would glide above the keys, dip and bob with the current of the melody, take sudden flight to cross the bridge of my right hand, once and then again, for a long run. When the ring came up missing, I searched everywhere. Then one day in church, I saw it on the finger of a younger cousin. A memory bubbled like water over a flame. I’d told a lie. Confronted by an older (very cool) cousin, I’d felt the searing pain of shame boiling over, could feel it even still as I glanced back at the pew behind mine. The heart looked large on her small hand. I could ask for it back after the service, gently suggest she hadn’t known it was mine. But I knew she had. I silently dubbed it hers.

• I “lost” my virginity to that same boyfriend. We’d been rubbing furiously against each other for hours when he asked gently, “Are you ready?” My reply was a soft, “Yes,” though I wasn’t 100 percent sure for what. Growing up north of the Salt Lake Valley’s far-reaching shadow in the ‘80s and ‘90s was like living on an island of purity culture in the material girl’s sea. While the world outside raised its collective glass to women’s newly won sexual freedom, the religion of my youth proclaimed the loss of virginity (or any sex) outside marriage the second sin to murder. I didn’t know then that, to ancient Romans and Greeks, a “virgin” was a woman or a goddess who was independent and autonomous—that the idea of a sexual virginity, aka honor and innocence, that could be lost (or defeated or devoured per Shakespeare’s Parolles) didn’t exist until around 1300. I did know I didn’t feel the boiling shame I’d felt over the lie. Still, though I mostly suppressed it, a quiet gnawing ate at my gut for long enough to damage its wings. What if what I felt in my heart was wrong? What if the teachings of the religion around me were right and what I had ultimately lost was eternity?

• I lost the giant framed painting that boyfriend gave me after I ended our relationship, when the twin flames of independence and autonomy inside me grew so bright I couldn’t stand to be anyone’s but mine. In it, a little girl and a little boy sat watching the ocean, his head nesting on her shoulder. A gull flew over the sea into the softly glistening sun. Across the back was scrawled a declaration of his undying love.

• I lost the marmalade orange VW ‘72 Super Beetle I loaded that painting into. I’d returned to my parents’ to stuff it haphazardly full of my belongings in boxes and plastic bags—this second leaving of my childhood home a redo from the first bitter ripping away of a year or so earlier. The bug had a sunroof, and during that visit, I let me kid brother and sister stand up and stick their heads out into the sky as I rolled through the neighborhoods of my youth. They whooped and beamed. I found their joy. It was a balm. By the time I lost the bug, a painter “friend” had painted the hood with acrylics in patterns fueled by pot and mental unwellness, scrawling (to my chagrin) “Holly” in the center of his art. I’d left the bug for a couple of weeks on a blighted block in south Salt Lake and returned to find her gone. I was hot-wiring her to start her by then and kept the title in the glove compartment. So, my search was halfhearted. I never named her.

• I lost the details of the first time I’d returned to my parents’ home half a year after the my initial departure (before the bug). An eruption ensued. I stormed out once more. It took me a long while to lose the feeling of it, though. Years later, my younger brother would recall his memories of that day. I learned his fear mirrored mine—that it meant me losing them, them losing me.

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I’m deeply grateful that, in the end, our fears didn’t play out. I’m grateful, too, that I didn’t lose my writing notebooks. This list (like last week’s essay within an essay, “Luis”) came from one of the notebooks I recently uncovered.

I would love for you to share the results of this prompt (in the comments or by email) if you’re called to: What have you lost?

Or here’s an alternative prompt: Write a story or a poem or make art from the Forest of Named Vehicles (you’ll have to email the art if you wanna share because comments are text only).

Free write recommendations: Write to a timer (maybe ten minutes). Don’t stop. Let whatever comes up take flight. Next third Saturday, I’ll feature a few of them!

Thanks,

Donna McArthur

, for the reminder that not everyone has a reader or writer Substack account. If you want to share but prefer to do so by email, please do! I’d love to see what these prompts engender however you want to share—or really to hear from you about anything that’s on your mind. (Please let me know if you prefer I not feature yours.)

As always, I’m grateful you’re here! If you’re visiting and you’d like more from the Rolling Desk, please subscribe. Subscribers (and likes and comments and shares) keep me rolling. And I’m ever so close to rolling up to my (absolutely arbitrary) subscriber goal by my birthday next month.

Isabella!