The next day all I remembered was thinking I’ll never find them here!
I awoke assuming it was probably just a remnant from some dream, and stumbled blearily to the jewelry box. Empty. I wandered around the apartment like a headless ghost searching for its heart.
“I can’t find all of my rings!” I mourned to Janaka. “I may have . . . hidden them from myself.”
“Did you try the bathroom shelves? The living room table? Did you look under the couches?” He looked askance at a slumbering Michael Dracula. “Maybe the kitties got to them.”
Everywhere. The pockets of all the clothing I’d brought. Purses, drawers, ziplock bags for make-up and shampoo. I crawled on the floors and slid my hands into cushions of dust beneath side tables. In the days that followed, I looked underneath every object I picked up, examined every possession as if it were something new: a clue, a code, a breadcrumb to another breadcrumb, a trail. I thought, “if I just see the right thing in the right light, I’ll know.”
Forks jumbled sideways and upside down in the silverware organizer. That painting, slightly askew on the wall. The uplifted corner of the rug. Don’t change anything! I’m trying to remember something.
The clarity of the few seconds preceding my ring set-down have been relived to the point of fiction. Okay, I think. I am pulling each one off my fingers — each ring associated with a different place, a different person, a different memory, each ring a thing I would twist around its finger during times of duress, boredom, the replacement for my “uh”s in speech. This is for high school and the slow, enchanted retail job with the snowy windows. This is for Portland, a mailed birthday present opened in an attic room. This is the stone that symbolically cracked in half. Yes. I am in my pajama pants, wool socks, a long sweatshirt. I take each ring off its finger. I stand there, clinking the rings around in one hand like fated dice, looking deviously around — what room, what room was I in? I’ll never find them here!
“Were . . . you sleepwalking?” Janaka asked. “In your memory, is it dark in the house?”
I closed my eyes and tried to think. “I don’t know,” I said.
It’s been two weeks. Where the rings once were I still twist, shift, clack. I barely even notice their absence any more; this is the new habit, a lot like the old habit. Most days now I forget to look, forget to examine everything, forget that something once so integral to my history is missing. My hands are empty totem poles. The jewelry box contains two barrettes.
The dressing room we’d been shown to for the Christmas show was a combination of all the worst attributes of the most dismal dressing rooms I’d ever seen. It may not even be fair to include it such a roundup since it was, technically, not a room at all but a hallway: part of an emergency exit in the basement between a dance club and the elevator up to our bar. A single florescent strip was stuck to the ceiling some thirty feet up, flickering off a filthy grey cement floor and tall cinderblock walls, and this distant shimmering gave the walls an illusion of movement, as if you were being shut in, buried alive.
I was twenty years old when our flight from Venice landed in New York, and like any self-respecting magical moment, it was late, late at night. Snowing, too, but it had snowed the entire time we were in Venice, and we were beginning to suspect that this is just what life looked like, now. 
On his new Tumblr curatorial blog 
For the first time in my life the plane ride was serene, which is kind of strange because we were flying in a rainstorm and couldn’t seem to land. It was around midnight and the sky was all black and wet, scattered with clouds like plumes of train smoke. No one but the pilot had spoken in hours. Put your tray tables up, he’d said (I thought briefly “what if I became one the few female captains”), and so we did. I had just finished my sad book, stared despondently at the cover for a while, wondered if I was capable of that much evil. I curled up into my seat like a little kid, watching the tributaries of rainwater split across the window, examining each peanut M&M before popping it into my mouth like they were something foreign — which they really kind of are (the majority of my life has been spent hating peanut M&Ms, until that one time I got stoned in the summertime and we rode through New Hampshire with the windows down and sang along to all of the songs). You are a brightly colored asteroid, I thought. You are an undiscovered mineral, you are the exoskeleton, you are the fossil left by the exoskeleton.