I lost my pen. One minute it was in my hand, the next minute it was gone. It dematerialized. Poof. Vaporized.
I didn’t actually see it disappear. It was more that I used it to scratch chai tea off my grocery list as I picked up a box off the shelf, and by the time I was in the bread aisle, my pen was no longer nestled in my palm and securely held by my fingers wrapped around it. Most likely I dropped it along the way. It was cold outside and only slightly warmer in this part of the store. My hands were stiff cold from the orange juice and frozen foods aisle, but what bother me was that I dropped it unaware, and that had more meaning than the loss of the pen. I couldn’t figure out how it could have slipped out of my hand without some awareness on my part.
I checked my purse, checked my pockets, even checked the aisles I had traveled. No pen. It wasn’t like I didn’t have another pen. After all, I am a writer. Carrying a journal and a couple of pens comes with the title. And it wasn’t like I’ve never lost anything before. It’s the way things disappear . . . and then reappear, sometimes years later.
Like the earring I lost in one city and found it years later in another.
It was a red and silver beaded earring that I obtained in Cherokee, North Carolina. The trip was a happy one with my then husband, Steve. The earrings held good memories. Besides, I loved those earrings and often wore them, which is what I was doing the night one disappeared, or maybe the more appropriate word is vanished.
I was standing in the entranceway to a girlfriend’s apartment while waiting for her to put on her coat. I don’t remember where we were going that night, but I can still vividly see myself standing there in my navy pea coat. She commented on my earrings, and then she left the room for just a moment. When she returned, she noticed one of my earrings was missing. Just like that, gone. We looked everywhere—in my hair, my clothes, coat pockets, in the carpet, even the couch that I hadn’t been near. Everywhere. No earring. I even searched my car just in case she only thought she had seen an earring in both of my ear lobes.
For years I kept the single earring, even started a trend among my friends. Every time someone complimented me on the earrings I was wearing, I’d take one off and give it to her. After a while we became quite a sisterhood of women wearing non-matching earrings.
Seven or eight years passed. I moved away from the city, out into the country. I stopped giving one earring away and stopped wondering about what happened to that red and silver beaded earring. Every once in a while, I’d come across the one I had kept, think about tossing it, but could never quite bring myself to do so. That lone earring seemed to be telling me I needed to hold onto it, and I listened and obeyed. I’m glad I did.
The day the lost earring reappeared, I was at the grocery store with a friend, Ken. As we were about to check out, he leaned down and picked up a single earring that was caught on the bottom of the cart. “Look at this,” he said. “Someone must have lost this earring,”
I saw the flash of red and silver, but my mind was not fully comprehending that this was my earring—the lost earring from years before. I couldn’t understand what had happened, still can’t.
I looked at my coat, the same coat I had on when I originally lost the earring. While Ken and I were grocery shopping I had thrown my coat over the back of the cart. All I could think of was that it must have been caught on my coat all these years. Still, that was pretty hard to understand. There were no tears in the lining, no open areas in the coat where an earring could hide. How many times had I put my hands in and out of those pockets over the years, pushing gloves and keys and wads of paper or tissues in and pulling them back out again? How many times had this coat been to the cleaners? It seemed impossible that an earring could have been somewhere in that coat all along, and yet here it was. Materialized. Fully intact. Unharmed.
I can’t explain what happened, how it happened, why it happened, only that it happened. To that I can testify. Maybe the earring was there all along, but its vibration changed so it couldn’t be seen in this world, and then something shifted for it to be seen again.
Perhaps we slip in and out of parallel worlds all the time, and as we mature spiritually, we become more aware of that. Are there other worlds living alongside us but unbeknownst to us because we are on a different frequency? Are we able to change our frequency at will by our thoughts and deeds? Can we, for example, move to a different frequency—dematerialize—during a time of danger, for example, and rematerialize when the danger passes? Can we become invisible to one who would do us hard? Or can we become visible to a loved one who is far away?
I have no answers to these questions that would satisfy the skeptic or scientists, but I strongly suspect the day is not so far away when moving among dimensions will not be left to speculation and the psychics and poets but will become a proven reality.
I don’t know why my earring materialized in a grocery store or why my pen dematerialized in a grocery story. I’m just glad the earring came back to me. I don’t expect the pen to. But then, who knows. Maybe someday in the future I’ll be walking through a grocery story and that pen will suddenly show up in my cart.
After all, it’s happened before.