xxxiii

“It's hard to dance if you just lost your wallet. Whoa! Where's my wallet? But, hey this song is funky...”

-Mitch Hedberg

I lost my wallet.

I lost my wallet and with it my debit card, my driver's license, my student ID card. But I lost much more than that. 

Inside the creased leather pockets were ticket stubs, parking passes, Star Trek fan club business cards, memories of good times in the hot summer, memories that I were counting on to help me limp through the new BIGCOLLEGETOWN experience, the familiar, loved social scene of senior photos and scrawled notes acting as a black leather crutch.

But now I don't have this crutch, much less the sixty dollars in loose bills and my university Sports Pass. And now I'm even more lost than before.

So you can please excuse me as I stumble through dark parking lots of last nights, through forgotten cotton holes in my mattress, through air-conditioned grooves in my father's car.

Because I am now like a blind man, poor and stumbling, seeing nothing through black leather eyes.