Why some people constantly lose their belongings and what it says about them

Steve Braunias lost his house keys ... again.

There are people who walk among us who walk in circles, eyes on the floor or footpath, hunting for things they have lost. House keys. ATM card. Phone. Glasses. Hearing aids! An important piece of paper. A belt, a shoe, obviously a sock; not so obviously a freshly made cup of tea. This is my life, these are the wasted sands in the hourglass of my days – I lose everything. “Lose something every day”, wrote the poet Elizabeth Bishop. “Accept the fluster/ of lost door keys, the hour badly spent./ The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” The other day I lost my house keys at Orakei train station. The great artist of loss had struck again.

Everyone loses something sometime. Some of us lose everything always. Patti Smith mused that lost objects are sometimes “drawn into that half-dimensional place where things just disappear”. I had my phone number on a tag attached to the keyring; a good samaritan found the keys and called to say she handed them to a security guard at Middlemore station, who said he would take them to the lost property office at Britomart station.

It’s the recidivism of it, the dull realisation of always crashing in the same car, the endless cycle of having something and then not having something. Kathryn Schulz examined the subject in The New Yorker. “According to psychoanalysis,” she wrote, “losing things represents a success - a deliberate sabotage of our rational mind by our subliminal desires.” Losing as a revolutionary act, as a wilful derangement of the senses. But all I desire out of life is order. I headed to the lost property office at Britomart. They had a box full of wallets. The art of losing wallets is so common! But no one had handed in my house keys.

Freud places the phenomena of lost objects in the subconscious. He describes “the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives”, including “the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or a secret antipathy towards it”. But what is lost can also be found. I wonder whether my motive to lose things is that it provides an opportunity to search for them, in the same way that I create disorder and chaos in my life so that it presents as a challenge to fix things. I took the train to Middlemore station.

AA Brill, who was Freud’s first translator and opened the first private practice of psychoanalysis in the US, declared this shocking insight: “We never lose what we highly value.” In fact I placed immense value in the keys. I spoke with a security guard at Middlemore station. He said no one had handed in my keys. Disconsolate, I crossed the overbridge to take the train back to Britomart and was waiting empty-handed on the platform when the good samaritan phoned to check on my progress. She described the guard and gave the exact time she gave him the keys.

Kathryn Schulz wrote in The New Yorker: “Beyond a certain age, every act of losing gets subjected to an extra layer of scrutiny, in case what you have actually lost is your mind.” This, I thought as I trudged back across the overbridge, is my life. I passed on the new information to the security guard. He called the guard who had been given the keys and put him on speakerphone. He said he had taken the keys to his home in Massey. He said he would bring them back to Middlemore station when he started his next shift. He said his next shift was due in seven days … His security firm intervened and sent a driver to his house to return the keys to my address. I was so happy to see them again. They were my only set. I had duplicates but lost them months ago.