Yesterday, I couldn’t find my passport, not that I needed it, I wasn’t going anywhere, hadn’t gone anywhere in ages, not since my partner and I decided to pack up the house we’d lived in for ten years and move to another (smaller) house, in another (larger) city, with car alarms and sirens and helicopters circling our neighborhood every Saturday night, a world that’s turned mine upside down (this is what I tell myself when I can’t find my keys or my phone or the pair of glasses I swear I just set on my desk), but, in that moment, finding my passport was what snagged me, wound me up, and set me loose on a tear through the house, certain I’d moved it from its old hiding place, a faded pink jewelry box—the kind a twelve-year-old might have, velvet lined with a plastic ballerina twirling to a Rachmaninoff tune, frozen and silent long ago—to a safer place, a smarter spot, though I’m no longer smart enough to remember where that spot is, or where I wrote down a reminder, because I write everything down now, determined not to become my mother, not to inherit her dementia, though I make these notes on whatever’s closest at the time, a grocery store receipt, a Post-it, the backside of a bank envelope that eventually gets tossed into the recycle bin; so on with the search for my passport continued until my partner, alerted by my panicked panting, stepped in with questions she thought were helpful, like When did you last have it?—the answer instantly obvious: Turks and Caicos, 2019—not what she meant, I realized after I blurted it, which only incited me more, the way I’ve come to lose the plot and embarrass myself, only this time she didn’t reach out to reassure me, the way my father used to reassure my mother, guiding her by the elbow through a cocktail party, whispering the names of old friends before greeting them, my mother’s smile never letting on that her memory was failing, until the time came when my father declined the invitations out to lunch or dinner and a movie, to spare my mother any shame, safe to lose herself inside the house they’d lived in for forty years without ever having to confront the terrors of a mid-life move to another house, in another city, a decision I now blamed my partner for foisting upon me, testing my ability to sift through what’s important, casting aside the trivial, like where my passport was when we had no trip planned, no flights booked, to let go of my deep need to find it after I’d decided the jewelry box was no longer safe enough—safe from what, I can no longer say—and, once again, I was the only one to blame, which whipped my anger into a frothy foam gathering at the corners of my mouth, pushing me through a pile of boxes, searching for one marked with some simple hint, scrawled akimbo in my block lettering, something like IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS or THINGS YOU’LL LIKELY FORGET, some crumb I’d dropped during the packing, perhaps in anticipation of how I might feel in another house, in another city, when I no longer trusted myself to navigate this upside down world without a hand on my elbow to guide me, until, in a spectacular flash of faith, I reversed course for the pink jewelry box, steered towards the linen cabinet, and found it straightaway, hidden behind a stack of towels; when I lifted its lid, the ballerina was alive again, twirling to Rachmaninoff’s tinkly tune, and then another miracle: my passport, nestled in the velvet lining, waiting patiently for me to return and claim it.

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Lori White’s most recent essays have appeared in Hippocampus and New Letters. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Kenyon Review anthology, Readings for Writers. She lives with her partner and three dogs in Ventura, CA.

Artwork by Shelley Lennox Whitehead