It was the year before last, early winter, and I was in a bad way, so I was calling people all the time to ask for advice I usually wasn’t able to take.
In the middle of this, wanting something more random than good advice, I put an inconspicuous link on my website that led to a page that read, Tell Me Something, along with a blank form: name, message, and a send button.
(It’s worth mentioning my website is weird—and weirder if you find the hidden links and pages— because why not make it weird since almost no one looks at personal websites anymore? I miss the glitchy ‘world wide web’ of 1997, the year I learned how to code HTML from “Webmasters” I met on geocities message boards.)
Almost immediately someone in Italy found the link and sent me something. I was in bed because I was having a hard time getting out of it.
The message said, Tanti auguri. That was it.
The internet told me this meant Congratulations.
Like many people unable to get out of bed, I was suffering from a chronic lack of both humor and common sense, but this message broke the spell. “Congratulations” was the funniest thing I could imagine being told right then. It also felt indirectly auspicious.
Seasons later, I was in Los Angeles talking to an old friend who studies memory. He told me that in times of intense novelty—traveling, or starting a new job, a new school, moving house—we store memories with greater detail and depth, and as someone who isn’t any kind of scientist at all, it seems to me that certain people in such times are also prone to see omens and patterns and signs.
I wonder if growing up in a religion causes or correlates with being one of these hapless sign-seers as an adult, and with some disappointment I must admit I’m one such hapless person, and because of this I spent that whole winter noticing almost nothing but symbols and uncanny coincidences and weird, magic, totally fucking strange things.
This was the first such thing— Tanti auguri, Congratulations— a Dadaist sign pointing me toward nothing in particular: feeling absurd, greeted by absurdity. For reasons too numerous to name, I had been considering going to Italy, learning Italian, and never coming back, but instead I ended up in Mexico, learning Spanish, and it was here I learned that auguri means omen and tanti is clearly the equivalent of tanto, both of which mean many or so many, and thus a loose translation of tanti auguri from Spanish could mean so many omens.
But also, just a few months before getting this tanti auguri I had published a story called “Congratulations on Your Loss,” an imaginary greeting card for someone tired of consolations. Just that week I’d been asked to read “Congratualtions On Your Loss” over the internet to a room of people at a university for a visit that kept getting covid-canceled. Yet another omen, I thought. You are here. You could be nowhere else.
It’s loss that makes people think this way; after losing, you start looking. It’s no wonder people join cults and religions and Crossfit when they’ve lost a person, or a freedom, or another belief.
And there’s a certain kind of losing (maybe it’s a quantity, maybe it’s a type) that can drive a person into an obsession with loss, and being in such a state, I spent much of that winter at holiday parties in the homes of people I almost never knew, asking total strangers what they’d recently lost. Dogs, marriages, money. It was always dogs and marriages and money.
A few months later I changed the text on that page from Tell Me Something to what have you lost? because one way out of this sort of obsession is to realize how ordinary it is, how unremarkable it all was, to lose.
In Spanish class one day, seasons later, I asked my teacher Diego, “Que significa perder?”
Instead of telling me what “perder” meant, he repeated my question and kind of smiled in that half-sad way. (Diego is a poet.) Not realizing it, I had asked him, “What does it mean to lose?”
The messages from strangers about what they’d lost started coming in. I read them all and I never wrote back. What could I say? I didn’t even know why I was asking and I didn’t know what I’d do with the answers. I must have wanted to learn something, though I’m not sure if I did, or maybe I still am.
Thankfully, things other than losing concern me now, but loss is never so far away, always asking us to make a constant peace with it. So that’s what this project is all about. Or that’s what I think it’s about though I’m probably, as usual, wrong.