Lost Objects

The lost object has often been where it belongs the whole time, people will tell you. "Did you look in the drawer where you normally keep it?" "Where was the last place you saw it?" Almost by definition, though, something lost will not be in its proper place. You can always trying looking there again; in rare cases, you will have overlooked it, in haste, due to a perceptual error, misremembering its color, say. Maybe someone else will have replaced it in the cabinet in the interim. It is not lost, then, but merely borrowed. These cases, however, do not go to the heart of the problem.  

If you tell the loser of the item to look in an improbable place, he will tell you he already knows it is not there. "I haven't been in that room in months." "Why would I have put it there?" Thus the seeker insists on looking repeatedly in the places where lost things ought to be, when clearly something misplaced is, literally, not where you think it is. There is no arguing with such people.    

One way objects can be lost is through use. To use an object one takes it down from the proverbial shelf; loss occurs through failing to put it back. The other way is through disuse: if something is not used for several years it tends to go missing through processes we do not fully understand, or simply by being tossed out with the trash in a moment of inattention.