It was the last thing you’d expect to find in a swimming pool. The last thing you’d expect me to find. “You never find anything,” you always said. “You never look.” You only said it in exasperation at my perennial, frantic hunting. No key was safe, no pair of spectacles too garish or well-chained to guard against mysterious disappearance. “You never look,” you roared, enraged, at each, predictable daily misplacing.
But this. This made the proverbial needle in a haystack look as inconspicuous as a lawnmower in a crib. If the water were still, it might have floated on the surface, an unnamed fingerprint, an upturned meniscus magically unattached. No, it was free-floating, all the more insubstantial for my ageing-man eyes, worse now than ever. And when I saw it, just the one, I almost lost sight of it again. Your voice, there as always. Tears almost washed the sight of it away. They didn’t though. I caught it on a fingertip, slipped it back in my eye, the way I can these days, without a mirror, even.