The Man Who Lost Things and the Thief Who Wandered

The man knew before he even checked the car.

His man-purse was missing.

It had been one of his little tricks to avoid losing his passport—put it in a bigger bag, something he wouldn’t forget or leave somewhere. That brown leather bag where he kept his passport was gone.

By now, he knew the pattern. The slow realization. The dull acceptance. The self-recrimination that came in waves—first annoyance, then shame, then the familiar, exhausted certainty that this would not be the last time.

Because it was always him.

It was always him who left things behind, him who had to double back, him who found himself standing in places he had already been, looking for something that was already gone. Or retracing his footsteps and finding the keys in a pants pocket in the laundry bin, or his wallet in the garden where it had fallen from his coat. He was always searching for things.

In the past, they were lost and maybe re-found.

But since moving to this little village, things seemed to go missing for good.

The Man Who Lost Things

The man did not know why he always lost things.

It was not that he didn’t care. He hated the feeling of losing something. It made him question his own sanity. It made him wonder if there was something wrong with him, if he was missing some crucial part of what made other people competent and organized.

His wife had tried to help him. She had suggested a camera outside the house so they would know when things disappeared. He had agreed. He had meant to follow through.

But he didn’t.

And so, things kept slipping away.

He had lost passports before. And keys. And glasses. And money. He had forgotten bags in taxis, left cash inside hotel safes.

He tried. He really did. But something in him resisted.

His father had been a man who checked the locks twice before bed. A man who was diligent and looked for safety. His father had believed in control, and so the man had grown into someone who believed in letting go.

And so things went missing. Over and over.

The Thief Who Walked in Circles

He walked the streets every day, circling the town in a rhythm no one understood. Rain or sun, it didn’t matter. He walked.

Checked car doors. Slipped newspapers under his shirt—though he couldn’t read them. Wandered into cafés, hovered near counters, took what wasn’t his.

Not for money. Not for need.

For something else.

He took things he had no use for. A keychain. A pair of glasses. A small object that had caught his eye, meaningless to him but precious to someone else.

He never kept them. He carried them for a while, then discarded them like breadcrumbs, leaving a trail that led nowhere—maybe in the river, maybe in a trash can.

The river snaked around the village, always waiting, always swallowing his prizes.

No one stopped him. No one confronted him. He was known, but not seen. A town ghost, his presence tolerated but never acknowledged. His family fed him, clothed him, but he was untethered.

They called him mentally ill.

He didn’t really speak. Sometimes a mumble, sometimes he would catch your eye. But mostly, he moved around town at the same pace, no urgency or direction.

No one looking for him.

And so he wandered.

And so he stole.

And so the cycle continued.

A Karmic Joke, If You Believe in That Kind of Thing

Some people get stolen from once and learn their lesson. They lock their doors, keep their belongings close, adjust their habits.

But the man who lost things?

He had been stolen from before.

And yet, he kept leaving things behind. Kept forgetting, kept losing.

And the thief?

He had stolen from others. But he always found his way back to this man’s car, this man’s things.

If you believed in karma, you might call it a cosmic joke. A thief who couldn’t stop taking, a man who couldn’t stop losing.

Brought together again and again, playing out the same tired scene, as if the universe was waiting for one of them to do something different.

The bag was gone. The passport was gone. Again.

He thought of the key bowl his wife had once suggested, of the camera he had meant to install, of all the small things that could have kept this from happening. He thought of the way he always resisted, always let things slide, always assumed he could get away with one more act of forgetting.

And he thought of the thief, still walking the streets, still circling the town, still taking.

Would he take again tomorrow? Would he slip a set of keys into his pocket? Would he find something else left in the open, something waiting to be taken?

Probably.

Because no one had stopped him.

Not his family. Not the village.

Not the man who lost things.

And yet, somewhere beneath his frustration, beneath his exhaustion, beneath his own refusal to change, something else stirred.

Something heavier than shame.

A feeling that this was more than just another lost object.

That he wasn’t the only one caught in the loop.

If he changed—if he finally owned his part—he wouldn’t just be stopping it for himself.

He would be stopping it for the thief.

Because maybe the thief didn’t need another keychain, another pair of glasses, another meaningless object.

Maybe he had been waiting for someone to finally anchor down.

Maybe he needed someone to notice.

Maybe he needed to be caught and seen.

Would this finally be the time?

Would he step out of the cycle?

Or would he let it happen again?

A karmic joke, if you believed in that kind of thing.

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