On a pair of chopsticks

Theft.

There is a pair of chopsticks.

They are red. The lacquer is glossy or was glossy once. Along the upper half, Chinese motifs, the specific motifs are no longer fully recallable, which is itself a fact about them. They were taken from a store in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in approximately 1980, by a twelve-year-old boy who did not know how to use them.

He put them in his pocket. He walked out. No one stopped him.

This is the first thing that happened to them.

Weight.

Chopsticks were first used in China five thousand years ago. They predate the fork by thirty-five hundred years. They were not invented as eating utensils. They were invented for cooking — for reaching into fire, for moving things that were hot. The eating came later, when it was understood that what could handle fire could handle food.

The Chinese philosopher Confucius, who was a vegetarian, wrote: the honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and the kitchen. And he allows no knives on his table.

The chopstick was the implement of a civilization that had decided the knife had no place at the point of eating. That the violence of preparation and the act of eating should be kept separate. The butcher used the tous. The diner used two smooth sticks.

The boy in Saint Paul did not know any of this. He knew they were beautiful, and they were not his, and that he wanted them.

Use.

Chopsticks require a specific grip. The lower stick is held stationary, resting in the crook between thumb and index finger, supported by the ring finger. The upper stick moves, controlled by the thumb and first two fingers, pivoting against the lower. The two sticks meet at the tips. What they pick up is held between those tips.

The grip is learned young. The hands of children are still forming their habits. A child who learns to use chopsticks before the age of ten will hold them for the rest of their life the way their first teacher held them, or the way their mother held them, or the way the older child at the table held them. The grip is transmitted. It carries its history in the hand.

The boy in Saint Paul learned to use them in his thirties. In a city that was not Saint Paul. From a person whose name is no longer the point. He learned the grip. He used them twice.

Carrying.

Between the theft and the learning, there were twenty years. During those twenty years, the chopsticks were not chopsticks. They were an object kept. They moved from Saint Paul to New York. From New York to London. From London to Washington. Four cities. One ocean. They were packed and unpacked more times than they were used.

What do you call an object carried across four cities and an ocean that has been used twice? Not a tool. Not a decoration. Not a souvenir, because a souvenir is taken from a place to remember the place, and the chopsticks were taken from a store to possess something that was not yet understood.

They were taken because the twelve-year-old boy reached for them. The reaching was the point. The chopsticks were what the reaching looked like.

Disappearance.

At some point around the age of fifty, the chopsticks disappeared.

Not lost in any recoverable sense. No specific moment. No move gone wrong, no box mislabeled, no shelf where they were and then were not. They left the way things leave when you are not watching them — gradually, silently, in the space between one life and another.

The not-noticing is its own kind of fact.

Forty years of carrying and then an absence that announced itself only when someone looked. The looking happened because of a dream.

Dream.

The dream was not about the chopsticks. The dream was about being a teenager. About the specific quality of optimism that belongs to that age.The sense that the world is large and reachable and that the distance between wanting something and having it is just a matter of time and nerve. The chopsticks were in the dream the way objects are in dreams: present, unremarked upon, simply there, the way they had simply been there for forty years.

He woke up. He looked for them. They were not there.

The dream had known something he had not known yet: that the chopsticks and the teenager and the optimism of reaching for something beautiful that did not belong to him had all gone to the same place. Not lost. Finished. The object had been keeping something for him and when he no longer needed it kept, it left.

The chopsticks are five thousand years old and also twelve years old and also gone.

There is no record of when they left. There is no record of where.

There is a dream.