Lost and Found

This is all my fault.

That was my first thought on New Year’s Day. Sunlight poured through the curtains, stark and uninvited, slicing across the floor. The cold pressed against the glass. I imagined the mountains whispering to each other: There’s the girl who lost her phone on New Year’s Eve.

Actually, it was stolen.

I tried to push the blame away from me. Anger rushed in and shook the champagne headache out of my head.

“Why would anyone want my old phone?”

I paced around the small hotel room. The view of the Alps and snow kissed rooftops failed to brighten my mood.

In fact, the snow was too bright, the sun too positive, for such a bad start to the year. I closed the curtains.

I clicked on Find My iPhone from my laptop.

Nothing.

Last seen - where I had seen it last. At the hotel restaurant.

I retraced my memories of the night, replaying them like an old film reel.

The hotel bar hadn’t even been packed. Couples and families were scattered like pieces across a board, relaxed, trusting. The air smelled faintly of mulled wine and pine needles from a Christmas tree someone had stopped watering days before. A family debated card rules in Italian, a couple shared a cigarette outside, smoke feathering out into the cold.

When midnight approached we all gathered on the dance floor. Smiles were shared, glasses clinked. We shouted numbers in different languages. A brief crescendo. For a moment we were one. Then we retreated back into our corners and tables. We were strangers again, pretending we hadn't just entered the new year together.

And then - that’s when I realised.

My phone was gone.

It simply vanished, swallowed by the stuffy air and the dissolving crowd, leaving a hole in my hands. I checked my coat. My bag. The table. Again. Nothing.

In the first minutes of the year, I felt a violent emptiness. Thousands of photos, conversations, memories, all gone. Somewhere, someone in the hotel held my life in their hands.

I felt exposed, vulnerable in a way I hadn’t expected.

I thought of the ski resort that spilled down into the valley. Chairlifts swinging over slopes, the air crisp and bitter. Nights spent in the cosy hotel bar, playing with bent cards and games with missing pieces, laughter bouncing off wood panelled walls. And somewhere in that quiet, white world, my phone had been stolen.

I left the resort with the same hole in my hand like a burn mark. Find My iPhone did nothing for days. A silent, indifferent map.

Then, suddenly, four days later, a dot.

A single blinking dot, deep in the middle of the resort, just days after I had flown south to France. I imagined my phone lying face up under snow, waiting. Five hours and five minutes away, close enough to haunt me.

Life carried on. And yet part of me stayed in the Alps. I checked the map compulsively. If I stared long enough, would it find its way home? I pictured it abandoned, buried under snow. Why had it been left there? The questions swirled in my mind, making me dizzy.

Eventually, I bought a new phone. It’s quite hard to go about without one these days...but the days without it were stranger than I expected.

I noticed small things, the ones I used to scroll past. The stripes on my cat’s face, the glint of sunlight on his fur. Birds calling from the trees. I listened to songs on the radio and finally heard their lyrics. I opened drawers in my bedroom and read old letters, diaries, resolutions from years past. Without realising, time slowed. Moments lengthened. Each observation anchored me to the present.

And those days, unexpectedly, were the happiest I could remember.

I thought about the night in the hotel bar. The fizz of champagne on my tongue. The faint scent of pine from the forgotten Christmas tree. I remembered holding my glass, counting down, feeling relief for the year just ended. And then nothing - just the emptiness of something no longer in my hands.

Weeks passed. I still imagine the dot beneath the snow, blinking patiently. It pulses faintly in my mind, a ghost of the past that refuses to disappear entirely. I picture hikers stumbling upon it in spring, pausing before walking on.

By spring, the snow will melt. The phone will still be there: glass, metal, wires, but now just a brick in a pile of water.

But the memories won’t be inside it. They’re in me, instead.

Absence, I realised, teaches attention. Losing something forces you to slow down, to notice more. My phone had just been a container, a map, a tether to moments I had already lived.

I thought about all the times I had scrolled through other people’s lives, thumbs on autopilot, eyes glued to a screen. I felt the quiet shame of those hours, the hollow fascination with someone else’s world. This is all my fault, I thought again, but differently now.

Not for losing the phone, but for losing part of myself.

And now, somehow, I had found the part I hadn’t been paying attention to.

Sometimes I imagine driving back to the Alps, five hours and five minutes, to retrieve the blinking dot. My chest tightens at the thought. I could go. And yet, maybe it’s better that I don’t.

Perhaps it was exactly what I needed.

I could go back in summer. Not to recover it, but to look up instead of down. To notice what I missed the first time.

The dot became a reminder that life exists in noticing, not archiving. And by the time the sun melts the snow in the Alps, the phone will remain. But I will have walked new paths. I will have made new memories. I will have noticed more. The ache will remain too, but less sharp, a quiet reminder of what was lost and what was found again.