Member-only story
Lost Wallet
How missing one little accessory can shape your whole worldview
Lose your wallet, and life stops. Your money ceases to exist. Your credit is null and void. Your personhood can’t be verified. You can’t legally operate the car you’re sitting in, as you frantically search your pockets for the missing item. You can’t even pick up a book from the library.
“When did you last see it?” people ask, instinctively. Every child knows to ask this question, including yours. But the answer is moot, because you know where you lost it: On the bike trail, as you took a five-mile ride along the Providence River. Somewhere along that route, as you pedaled especially hard, the wallet wriggled out of your back pocket and fell to the pavement.
“Someone will return it,” proclaims a woman you know, your son’s art teacher. “I have faith.”
You wish you had faith like that. But the loss of a wallet is an all-consuming event. You have to assume you’ll never see it again; indeed, you have to assume it’s fallen into malevolent hands, and your cards are now being used to buy every diamond and non-fungible token on the market. For all you know, your identity has already been used to open bank accounts and print dummy passports. Maybe a guy in a ski mask is driving his van slowly past your house, because he used the address printed boldly on your license.
These are the images that flash through your mind, as you cancel one card after another, deleting yourself from existence. As you wait for replacements, you live in limbo. At the DMV website, digital text claims your new license will arrive “within 60 days,” and “this receipt will be accepted for local and state law enforcement purposes.” If you’re ever pulled over in the next two months, your only protection is a screenshot on your phone.
There was nothing special about your wallet. It was just a leather rectangle, weathered and overstuffed. But because you’ve never lost a wallet before, you now realize how precarious your life has always been. Without your documents, you can barely convince yourself to breathe.
The irony is, you used to wear a chain, which connected wallet to belt. For 15 years, you walked around like a slacker from 1993, and you loved it. Only last year, when you got an…
