And Other Small Vanishings
The sky outside this morning was cloudier than normal for this time of year. My mind felt the same way—overcast from within. That's what insomnia does to me.
I stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to finish, and noticed the drawer half-open. Something felt off. There had been eight. I was certain of it.
Two rows of four, nested neatly in the cutlery tray. Stainless, slender, and quietly loyal to their purpose—each one perfectly weighted for stirring honey into a morning mug, or tapping dry leaves from a spent tea bag. But sometime last week, without sound or ceremony, one of the tea spoons was missing.
I searched the usual places: the sink, the dishwasher, the coffee table. Then the not-so-usual ones. My desk drawer, the back patio, the inside of the kettle. Absurd, perhaps—yet there's something almost tender in the act of looking for a thing you know you won't find.
These absences arrive silently. They wait quietly to be noticed. Gaps that seem to predate the noticing itself.
Later that afternoon, during a video call, I muted myself and stared toward the window. My reflection hovered faintly in the glass, pale and blinking. Outside, a single cloud drifted past, directionless. Someone on the call mentioned timelines. I glanced at the corner of my screen.
14:07.
I don't know what it meant—only that I noted it in my journal at the time. Another thing lost, perhaps? Time seemed to be operating under different rules.
The next morning, I joined a meeting eight minutes late. Not disastrously so, but enough to feel off. I had checked the time beforehand. I had planned. But somehow the minutes dissolved, quietly, between one moment and the next.
There was no notification, no glitch, no task I had lost track of. Just a strange sense of having slipped a little, as if time had softened its edge and let me pass through. Woolf once wrote of time as something tidal, something felt more than counted. It felt like that—like the hour had moved sideways. What else dissolves while we're not looking? While we’re all not looking?
Later that same day, another spoon was gone.
Not from the set. A mismatched one I use for jam or yogurt. It was just—not there. A small subtraction, like the flick of an eraser. Keats had a line about unheard melodies being sweeter. I think of that sometimes, holding the emptiness where the spoon should be. The tiny whirlpools that form while I'm stirring a touch of sweetness into my Earl Grey.
There's a drawer in this house that holds the not-quite-useful: single cufflinks, orphaned keys, birthday candles half-melted. I keep thinking I'll sort it, but I don't. Perhaps I share something of Clarissa's fear of the junk drawer—not just the clutter itself, but what sorting through it might reveal: how little of what we think we've saved has actually been preserved.
It sometimes feels like the world is keeping quiet inventory—not of possessions, but of presence itself. A slow accounting of what has passed through and no longer returns.
And maybe I'm doing the same. Without meaning to. Without knowing why.
Still, I leave the space in the tray where the tea spoon used to go. Not in hope, exactly. Just in case the shape of it matters.
Sometimes, I check the time and feel like I've missed something.
Sometimes, I catch myself waiting.
Watching the overcast sky, waiting for it to clear.
— Dean Bowman
Tuesday, 3 June 2025
Dean Bowman