Lost Quote by Paul Vermeersch

““Lost Things" There are many ways to understand the word lost, my love. When you were born, the last Pyrenean ibex, a tawny female named Celia, had not yet lived to see the view from Torla overlooking Monte Perdido, but her great- grandsire stood on the cliffs of Ordesa, positioned on hoof-tips dainty as dimes, and he shook his impregnable skull, a coffer of brass and nobility crowned with bayonets, as though in defiance of all who dwelt in the highlands from Catalonia to Aquataine. Their kind is vanished now. Forever lost. Perdido. And when you dressed in a Girl Guide’s uniform of Persian blue on Tuesday nights, my love, in the long-lost basement of Grace United Church, to play indoor baseball and make believe that faerie magic could make you rich or important or happy, pods of baiji dolphins still swam in a river you’d never heard of and would not think about until years later, when together we would learn from the evening news that the baiji were lost, at last, from the Yangtze, and in their place there came a universal emptiness. There are many ways to understand the word lost, but it does not help to imagine a secret place where lost things go. When last I held you in my arms, my love, the West African black rhinoceros was still magnificent and still alive, but now the gentleness of your breath on my bare neck is as lost as the dusty, confident snort of that once breath-taking beast. Great strength is no protection, and neither is love. We are born, and our births are lost. We can’t go back to them. Each embrace ends with an ending. When we become, what we once thought we’d be is lost. We keep becoming.””

— Paul Vermeersch