LOST: One Sock (Grey, Left)

It was a Sunday and I was bored and the dryer had eaten another one, and I thought it would be funny to make a poster. LOST: ONE SOCK. GREY, LEFT FOOT. ANSWERS TO "SOCK." LAST SEEN LAUNDRY ROOM, 4B. REWARD. I printed it on the good paper. I put a little photo of the surviving sock on it, looking lonely on the windowsill. I stuck it on the pole outside the building next to the ones for lost cats and guitar lessons. I went back inside and forgot about it. Monday there was a note tucked under it. Handwritten. "Have you checked under the machine? They get stuck under the machine. Sorry for your loss. Marie, 2A." Tuesday there were three notes. One of them was a poem. I want to stress that I did not know we had a poet in the building. Wednesday someone had put a small candle at the base of the pole. By Thursday there was a second poster, in a different font, from someone in the building across the street. FOUND: ONE SOCK. NAVY, RIGHT. NOT YOURS BUT THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW. IS THIS A THING WE'RE DOING NOW? It was, apparently, a thing we were doing now. Within two weeks the pole had eleven posters. A guy in 6C was looking for a Tupperware lid, "square, blue, we both know you have it." A woman named Denise was looking for "the motivation I had in January." Someone had put up a very sincere MISSING notice for a specific sense of humour, "last seen before the 2am group chat about the HOA." The lost cat and the guitar lessons had been respectfully moved to the top. I hadn't told anyone the sock poster was mine. This became a problem when Marie from 2A cornered me in the lobby and said, "Have you seen the sock guy? I want to tell him I found one in the dryer that might be his," and I had to decide in real time whether to confess. "I'm the sock guy." "You're the sock guy." "It was a joke."

"Honey, it was a joke for about eight hours. Now it's a community." She was right. On the Saturday, without anyone quite organising it, about fifteen people ended up on the sidewalk by the pole with coffee, reading the posters and arguing about the Tupperware lid. The guy from 6C and the person who had the lid, who turned out to be his own neighbour, had a public reconciliation. Denise did not find her motivation but did find someone to go to the farmers' market with. The poet, who was a retired accountant named Howard, read the sock poem aloud and it was, I'm sorry to say, genuinely moving. I found the sock. I want to be honest about that. It was under the machine, like Marie said, the whole time. I took it upstairs and put it with its brother and I did not tell anyone, because the sock had stopped being the point, and also because I didn't want to be the one who ended it. The pole is still going. There's a laminated sign at the top now that just says THE POLE, which someone in the building made, and under it, still, on the good paper, going a bit soft at the edges, LOST: ONE SOCK. Reward's still on offer. Nobody's claimed it. I think we all know why.