Have you ever lost something that you still grieve for?

An object, I mean. Fluffy and Meemaw don't count.

You keep things. An old toy. A blanket. A lucky silver dollar. They hold sentiment. They hearken you back to happier times. Simpler times. They provide comfort and safety. They are a part of you. And oh... it is so VERY hard to lose one. Like losing a limb. And we need our limbs. They keep us standing, steady and able. An object can carry significant meaning. It might even inform your identity.

Object attachment is perfectly normal. It is not hoarding. They're cousins. But hoarding is a topic for another day. Today, the topic is the garden-variety sad sack who has lost something. A thing. Today's topic is you.

Parting ways with one of these things may not necessarily be as painful as saying bye-bye, so long, farewell to your college sweetheart until the summer's through ("See you [sob-sob] in September..."), but dammit, it still hurts. Then one day, you may be leaning on a counter, waiting for the Keurig to stop chuffing, or you may be trying to find a magazine from this century in the lobby of a Quick Lube, and slowly the image of this object will enter your mind's eye. And then you will pine for it. You will pine hard. A hole opens up in your chest. You fancy the curl of a good old fetal position. But instead, you take your coffee and go back to work, or you take that People magazine and bury your thoughts in a puff piece about Neil Sedaka. 

Perhaps in literature, the best representation of the longing you feel in these moments is in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." Especially in the pathetic plight of Gollum.

"We wants it," says Gollum of his one, true ring. "We needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little Hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!"

And that yearning, that mourning, can extend to less tangible things than, say, a prized G.I. Joe with kung fu grip or a pink ceramic monkey crackled from age. It's what these things represent, isn't it? After all, in the movie "The Maltese Falcon," that leaden bird paperweight that everybody wanted so badly was just "the stuff that dreams are made of."

Because you can lament the passing of your youthful spirit, too. Your moxie. Your spunk. You once had the zest of life. It was a wonderful thing. Glorious. Where is it now? It is gone. Will it ever return? You lie in bed at night and try to count sheep, but your bottled-up emotions surface and begin to bleed through the sheets. You have to keep buying new sheets, don't you?

The crux of this phenomenon, the pain of loss for a thing, a beloved object, whether it has genuine mass and takes up space by having volume or is only a matter of your mind, an object of desire, again can be best illustrated by Gollum. This time from the book "The Hobbit."

One day (or is it night?), Gollum encounters an interloper in his tiny, glum underground lair at the roots of the Misty Mountains. It is Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo is lost. Gollum strikes up a bargain with Bilbo. He will show Bilbo the way out of this unhappy place if Bilbo wins at a game of riddles. If Bilbo loses, however, Gollum will eat him. Gollum will "eats it whole." Fair enough, Bilbo agrees.

One of Gollum's riddles goes like this:

“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,

Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,

It lies behind stars and under hills,

And empty holes it fills,

It comes first and follows after,

Ends life, kills laughter.”

Do you know the answer?

Maybe you don't want to.

Maybe this is a riddle best left unsolved. For the answer will not illuminate you. Just the opposite, in fact.

In the grand scheme of things, if you have to choose between feeling the pain of loss and not feeling the pain of loss, if the trade-off was the answer to this riddle, then you, like me, would choose pain over darkness.

That said, Anthony, if you're reading this, if you ever find my Chewbacca action figure, I would like it back. We needs it.