Someday I will come around a corner and find everything I’ve lost.

I will find my radio compilation tape, recorded in snatches in two thousand four and five.

The pictures of our last family reunion, which I distinctly remember and which obstinately do not exist, will be in a marked envelope, waiting with quiet indignation to be shuffled into my photo album.

Nineteen CDs, my whole collection at the time, in the case that was hopefully bought to hold 60, and which was left permanently in David’s car on my first trip home from college, will be sitting on a table.

The regard I thought I’d lost when, back in high school, I found that the story of a relationship had been misrepresented to people I cared for, will be found in a warm bundle.

There will be a graceful, welcoming arrangement of the dignity and face that I dropped while staggering my way through my first disastrous role as a girlfriend.

There will be open boxes showing what good had come, finally, of all the time I wasted on the design class I dropped and in all the hours I spent staring at and not doing my math homework, through many years.

The thoughts and ideas and stories I never wrote will show the paths they took, in the lives of the people to whom I spoke, and the fear that they would only have added to the burgeoning weight of media that we have to deal with will be shown subverted.

The other halves of all the pairs of my favorite earrings will peek at me from other piles, twinkling; a metal rose, a gold and silver hoop, a silver and turquoise feather, a pearl or two, the beaded half-hoop I got from Hannah…

I will find The Snow Queen, the version borrowed from the library when I was five years old and wasn’t read to us before it returned, before I knew the story, so that all I knew was the haunting pictures, with its processions of red goblins across snowy hills…. the story found in a lush green and purple library book, about the wind-up mechanical mouse who visited real mice in the garden and saved them, somehow, at a personal sacrifice…the story of animals who sailed away across the sea to a new land, faced a strange partially cloth monster and eventually defeated it using a trap with honey, only to find it was a costume with more of their own kind inside… and the Sleeping Beauty, with elaborate illustrations of roses entwining the borders of the pages, and its portrait of the princess standing near a winding stair, with a dagger at her belt.

My half of the best friends’ necklace that Kristi gave me.

The cross necklace I was given at my baptism, with its oh-so-delicate chain and its golden bud endings, which I lost in a game of football at church in grade school, and which I lost again and permanently after it had been replaced some years later. This time it took with it my golden kitty face that I had had since I was tiny (which itself had been lost for years), and a pewter initial N, also from my dear Kristi. They were all three on the same chain, and are at the bottom of a lake.

Kristi herself might be waiting there for me.

My brother Daniel will be there, in the green and brown turtleneck that I always saw him in.

He and other relatives who have been lost to me, and not all by death, will be speaking kindly, and reconciled. This last is my most fond picture of heaven.