There is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop called “One Art,” and the repeated line in the poem is “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” This weekend I lost a necklace I’ve had for twelve, nearly thirteen years and that line has been circling through my brain ever since. It was (is) a charm necklace, though it didn’t start out as such. At first it was just a necklace with a crown on it, a souvenir from the Tower of London, bought during my first trip out of the country when I was eight. I wore it constantly, I swear I wore it until it wore itself a groove in my neck. Over the years my parents gave me charms to add to it—a music note, a cat, a heart, an owl, one of my grandmother’s old subway tokens—it became my lucky necklace.
When we went to visit the ruins and the beach in Ostia this past Saturday, I almost didn’t wear it, but then I saw it curled up on my desk and I put it on with only the briefest of thoughts (“Perfect.”). It was warm at Ostia Antica—an archaeological site outside of Rome, filled with ruins of a former port city—and I still had the necklace, hung carefully (precariously) around my neck. When we got closer to the beach it was breezier, cooler, so I put on my scarf and then my jacket. It wasn’t until I got home much later that night, when I took off my jacket and my scarf, that I felt the nakedness around my neck; that I realized the necklace was gone.
It was with a sort of grim, rising hysteria that I walked back to the bus station, but there was too much ground to cover and it was too dark to fully retrace my steps. We’d taken two buses and two trains to get to the beach alone, it was a good hour and half away from our house and the sun had set. My necklace, the one I’d had for nearly thirteen years—that I wore to auditions, to the SATs, to prom, to the grocery store, to class, at home with my cat—it was gone.
It was so silly, this little amalgamation of silver and gold and alloys had taken on a sort of sentience in my mind, melding itself just the slightest bit into my perception of self. And in a single afternoon, an infinitesimal fraction of its existence, it was gone.
But the art of losing isn’t hard to master.
And though that wasn’t really the point of the poem at all, even if it was just the words ringing in my ears along with the sadness, I know that although I will miss it, this wasn’t such a disaster. I didn’t lose farther or faster, not a house, not a city, not a realm, and most importantly, most essentially, most vitally not a “you.”
And that is why I know that losing my necklace—it wasn’t (Write it!) a disaster.
One Art
By Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.