The art of losing

A two-and-a-half-year grudge...against myself.

Photo by Barrie Kreinik: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

- Elizabeth Bishop

Three years ago, my mother gave me the perfect wristwatch. It was the tiniest one I’d ever seen, the links in its stainless steel band just a quarter-inch wide, its minuscule face sporting hands like silver hyphens. She’d bought it two decades earlier at a now-extinct boutique on the Upper West Side. Since I’m one of those rare millennials who actually wears a watch, I accepted with delight when she offered it to me.

I wore the watch for several months, alone or paired with bracelets, receiving frequent compliments on its delicacy. I have narrow wrists, so its small size suited me. I loved it more than any watch I’d ever owned.

Early in 2023, I noticed something odd: now and again, while wearing the watch, I’d glance down to find that the clasp had popped open. For some reason, it never occurred to me that such a thing shouldn’t be happening, that I might want to get it repaired. I’d simply snap it shut and move on.

One day in March of that year, I took a train to Connecticut to meet my mother at a mall for some retail therapy. My then girlfriend and I had just begun “taking a break.” Sadness was lodged in my throat, fear in my solar plexus. I was tense and distracted, trying to lose myself in in the lure of browsing for new clothes. It only half worked.

We’d been at the mall for about an hour when, while standing at the checkout counter of a department store, I looked at my wrist and saw that the watch was gone.

The floor beneath me tilted like a sinking ship. Immediately I began combing the space around me with my eyes. I covered every inch of ground I’d walked inside that store, to no avail. Then my mother and I retraced our steps throughout the entire mall.

I never found the watch.

My mother was surprisingly sanguine. The watch wasn’t expensive or precious, she said. It was just a piece of jewelry, I’d find a new one. But I couldn’t stop kicking myself for losing it. Had I thought the clasp would fix itself? That the watch’s escape attempts were an anomaly that would simply cease? Why hadn’t I taken it to the nearest jewelry store for repair as soon as I noticed there was something wrong with it?

It’s been two and a half years and I haven’t let go of my grief about losing that watch. It’s a grudge I hold against myself that I might never relinquish. The fate of that stainless steel band was entirely within my control, and I failed to preserve it.

I couldn’t prevent the demise of my relationship. I couldn’t change the fact that my girlfriend wasn’t ready to have a relationship. I couldn’t stomach, at the time, the idea that I’d built a future for us in my mind that was crumbling around me, nor the realization that I hadn’t met my forever person after all. I didn’t know then that the break would turn into a breakup of my own volition. I could only count the minutes as my heart began to heal.

But I could no longer count them on the world’s most perfect wristwatch.

I’ve tried on at least a dozen watches since then, but none have come close in beauty or elegance. I’ve combed eBay and Poshmark, searching for the watch’s familiar face, wondering if one day the person who picked it up and took it home—because that’s what must have happened: I called the mall a few weeks after the incident and was told that no such object was in the Lost and Found—will decide to sell it. I own other watches, and they’re lovely, and I’m grateful for them. But I can’t quite get over the fact that I once owned a silver circlet that fitted my wrist like it grew there, and I let it fall off.

I still own the link that was removed from the band to make it smaller, because my wrists are even narrower than my mother’s. But I can’t grow a new watch from a single steel rectangle. I can’t get back the time I lost trying to save a doomed partnership. I can’t press rewind and return to my bedroom at the moment that clasp first popped open, when I could have taken the watch off and whisked it away to be adjusted so that it would never leave my wrist.

Maybe someday I’ll stop beating myself up for losing that watch. Maybe I’ll find it again, or one just like it. Maybe the next time an object breaks and I have the power to fix it, I will, instead of trying to fix a person who doesn’t want help, or a bond that’s irreparable.

No, Elizabeth Bishop, the art of losing isn’t hard to master. What’s arduous is the art of accepting loss.

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