№ 00150: Sunglasses

You're not fooling anyone with your nonchalance

Lost Object Claim № 00150: Sunglasses

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: Sunglasses

Color: Black

Size: Sunglass size

Approx. date lost: Feb ‘24

Location: Madrid, Spain

Here is what claimant № 00150 had to say:

“I stole them from a guy I met on Tinder last year”

Concise.

Everything about this claim, № 00150, is almost too perfectly nonchalant. Your reference to “a guy you met on Tinder” is written to minimize your attachment to this object by associating it with an anonymous face in a sea of swipes. The spare words, at times laced with a tinge of sarcasm (“Sunglass size”) — it’s as if you took a deep sigh, picked up a pencil, and filled in this Lost Object Claim with as much ennui as one could possibly have while voluntarily and intentionally engaging in a participatory art project (there is side-eye implied in my tone here).

Artist rendering of № 00150 filling out their claim ticket (don’t @ me Disney)

Sorry — but I’m not buying it, claimant.

You had some attachment to these sunglasses, or you would not be putting a claim out into the world to find them. So why hide it? Why cover it with this emotional distance, does it make you feel cooler, or is it because you don’t feel like these sunglasses should be *worthy* of claiming? You are still thinking about them, several months later (this claim was submitted in May) — and you cared enough to pack them with you when you went to Europe.

It’s okay to feel attachment to even fleeting connections. Every person we meet is a nervous system we hook ourselves to, be it for a passing moment or decades. Objects can imbue themselves with meaning beyond their function — especially when they connect us tenuously to a version of ourselves from a particular moment in time, or from a particular connection.

I also would be remiss if I did not point out that this Lost Object is really twice lost. Lost first by the Tinder guy when you stole them, № 00150, and then by you yourself. I find myself imagining the sunglasses having fallen between the slats of a bench in a Metro station in Madrid, or picked up by a server on a particularly bright day after they were left in their restaurant’s lost and found for several weeks. Have they had another connection, another claimant?

Well you did not give the universe much to go on, № 00150, in terms of locating these “black, sunglass-size” sunglasses. But I hope this process helped you remember something you felt a fondness for, once upon a time.