Sometimes my feet get cold, even in the summer. Other times I like to slather lotion thickly on my feet and then put on a fat, fluffy, thick pair of socks. There used to be a pair of socks like that in my life. Here is a picture of one of them. Just one? Read on.
Where is the other one? I don’t know. I haven’t seen both socks together at the same time in about 25 years. But I believe the other sock is here somewhere among my stuff.
Every now and then, like this morning, I will be rummaging through an overstuffed drawer of underwear, tights, slips, scarves, t-shirts, tank tops, and other socks, and I’ll come across one of these thick white socks with the red heel and toe. And I’ll say to myself, “Here’s one of those socks and I’m sure the other sock is around here someplace. I’ll finally have the whole pair.” I’ll tuck that sock safely back into the drawer and go on about my day. Until on a different day I come across the other sock (or is it the same one?) somewhere in another drawer or maybe that drawer and say, “Yes! Here’s the other sock!” but thinking Maybe it’s the same sock.
You might be thinking, “Just give it up, okay!” but I would reply that years ago I had a favorite pair of earrings and I lost one. I thought I lost it in the bedroom of the guy I was semi-living with at the time. I had a soft, cloth duffel bag that I kept next to the bed where clothes and things from my house had accumulated. I kept thinking I had dropped the missing earring into that bag. But I searched it thoroughly many times and never found it. However, I hung onto the one earring and kept believing. Eventually the guy and I broke up and I took my duffel bag home and put it in my closet. A few years after that, I signed up for a P.E. class at the community college I was attending and thought about using that bag for my exercise togs. I pulled it out of the closet, set it on my bed, and PRESTO! 
there was the second earring! I don’t know if it fell out of the bag, or had somehow attached itself to the outside–I was convinced I had searched the bag quite thoroughly years before. 
But there was the earring and the two earrings were reunited forever.
If I decide to give up and throw away the sock I found today, I feel sure that it would take approximately 15 minutes for the other one to turn up, probably in the middle of the living room floor, on top of the stove, or in the hallway outside my apartment. So I will hang on to The Phantom Sock for another 25 years, if that’s what it takes. By then I’ll be 102 and maybe it won’t matter anymore.
Do you have objects that behave this way?
