Wedding detail: lost and found

I lost my wedding jewelry. But then I found it. I thought.

Not my ring. No, that was already (almost) taken care of by Johnny at the moment of proposal when he dropped (and quickly caught) my ring on the edge of a boat. But my necklaces - the ones I wore on THE day - went missing.

For my wedding, I wanted to accessorize with very delicate, layered necklaces in gold. I hadn’t seen it done before, and it sounded beautiful and so feminine in my head. I spent the weeks and months leading up to the wedding collecting necklaces of varying lengths, and on wedding day, with my dress on, I chose three from my jewelry stand (one of the perks of being married at home and using your bedroom as the dressing room) that layered perfectly in three different lengths.

Much to my dismay, the gold chains against my very fair skin were barely visible in the photos, and I have no idea if they read as poorly in real life or not. Yet I still liked the concept, liked that it was different and liked that I chose to do that.

But weeks later, after an overnight stay in a hotel for a work event, two of them were gone - likely left behind on the hotel countertop, I surmised, in my rush to get out the door.

One of the necklaces, the longest of the three, was a very delicate gold chain dotted with satellite beads that had actually broken during the wedding reception. My Maid of Honor Sammie quickly tied it in a knot behind my neck and no one was the wiser. The second of the lost pieces was a quatrefoil pendant, symbolic of good luck, given to me by Sammie as a bridal shower gift.

I struggled with having lost them because of the sentimentality of the gift and the wedding day, not to mention the sense that I was completely losing my mind. And then, in a quick search of my belongings, I found them… somewhere… and put the concern out of my mind for several weeks.

But I couldn’t find them again. And I couldn’t remember where I thought I had seen them. And I started to second guess whether I had actually located them or if it had happened inside a dream, the kind of dream that resolves a stressful issue for you but without actually impacting reality.

I started to get nervous. And I started having recurring dreams that I had found them, only to wake up - and realize that the first incident was likely also a dream. And I started to get desperate. I tried to come to terms with the disappointing reality that they were lost and I would never see them again. I thought to myself that if I could find them, I would never wear them again - I clearly couldn’t be trusted to take such sentimental trinkets out on the town with an everyday outfit. But I didn’t think I would find them, so I began to go through the paces of making mental penance. Much, much worse things had happened in the year leading up to the wedding, but this one was on me - I messed up.

Finally, three weeks after the fated hotel stay and the morning after yet another infuriating dream, I resolved to contact the hotel, if for no other reason than to receive some closure on the incident. I attached pictures of the necklaces (not from my wedding of course, they couldn’t have seen them…sigh...) and asked if they had turned up in the lost and found.

I received the reply that evening, while running around packing for yet another work trip. The hotel hadn’t found them, the concierge said. She copied hotel security in her reply. It seemed like kind of a big deal. The concierge was kind enough to act like she cared, and the fact that they weren’t there left a small mental and emotional door open for me to imagine that they were somewhere else. I was sad but satisfied that I had finally reached out.

Not five minutes after receiving the reply, as I went through my cosmetics for packing, I picked up a small fabric pouch, and what happened next was my recurring dream once again - but this time in real life. I felt something very small inside the pouch, very delicate, and barely there - just barely. I rubbed the fabric between my fingers and felt just the slightest catch. I caught my breath as I looked inside. My dream had literally happened: there they were, a tangled mess, but there.

True to my word, I won’t wear these necklaces again - I can’t risk going through the stress and self-shaming of having misplaced them one more time. I am going to see about putting them in a shadowbox and adding them to my sunroom photo wall, both to protect them and to enshrine the bizarre experience of something precious lost, dreamed found, and then found.