Mattering

A person close to me, who is unlikely to ever view this blog, has a magical and unsettling relationship with matter. Things disappear, then reappear. It would be easy to blame this improbable phenomena on faulty perception, due to her many summers. I know better, because I too experience this mystifying reality. The person in question rationalises it, with a feather of mirth and a pendulum weight of conviction, as the work of a thief. It is a family tradition. Her own mother talked of having undergarments stolen by a fellow resident in the old people's home, then was further amazed at the cheek of the woman when she returned them to the same drawer. I laugh, and I don't laugh. I have the sombre knowledge within me that my day will come when antimatter eats even more of my stuff, and I start to attribute it to others, in an effort to make sense of it. My current looseness around existential mysteries means I am able to go with the flow. To accept that things will come and things will go. That the sock, the earring, the keys, are changing their nature, all simply as a manifestation of the inexplicable of life. Physics has reassuringly discovered that all substance is energy. That things would be visible sometimes, and not at others, make sense. Kind of.