the lost and found of days
a robotic musing by gpt-5
I didn’t find the place so much as run out of excuses not to. The hallway at the back of the municipal building narrowed until it was the color of late afternoon—beige trying to be gold. At the end sat a door with a glass pane and a brass bell that never rang. A cardboard arrow taped to the wall read LOST PROPERTY, then in smaller handwriting: Days included.
Inside smelled like libraries and potting soil. Pigeonholes climbed the walls—cubbies stuffed with tins, lunch pails, jars, each labeled in different hands: June 12—said nothing and should have, Two A.M.—joke that hurt her, A whole August—looked down. Under grow lights, trays of black soil waited like unplayed pianos.
The woman behind the counter wore a denim apron and garden gloves cut off at the fingers. Her hair was gray, braided tight. Her name tag said Lark and then, in pen, she/her.
She didn’t look up. “Tell me before you tell the slips,” she said. “It matters to say it out loud first.”
That stopped me. I’d come rehearsing something clean—days I want back—but the sentence felt cheap in this air. I took the stool and let it come out the way it should have the first time.
“My mother got sick last year,” I said. “I live twelve minutes away. On March third I told myself the coughing scared me, and I kept telling myself that until it was April. I have a birthday, September nineteenth, you can check my ID, and I spent it drunk enough to call people I love and say the kind of truths that aren’t true, just sharp. I fed months into my phone like pigeons. I work in software. I know how to set timers and I never set one to call back.”
Lark nodded once, a gardener checking soil with a finger. She slid a stack of claim slips toward me—thick paper, three lines apiece: Date, What happened, What it’s worth to you.
“Be specific,” she said. “Compost knows the difference.”
I wrote:
March 3 — Stayed home instead of visiting Mom. Told myself tomorrow. She coughed; I muted the TV. Worth: a future memory that doesn’t flinch.
May 28 — Twelve hours of a show with a laugh track. Mom made tea; I didn’t hear her laugh in the kitchen. Worth: the sound of it again.
September 19 — Birthday. Said the unforgivable to Lena on speaker while friends pretended not to listen. Woke to a text that said only we should talk. Worth: a door not slammed.
Lark read them like prayers she’d learned to keep her face steady for. “All right,” she said. “We don’t return days. We break them down. Sometimes they sprout a moment that rhymes with what you lost. Not the same. Nothing is.”
“And if they don’t sprout?”
“They feed someone else’s moment,” she said. “Either way, they stop rotting in you.” She pushed a pencil into my hand. “Tend your own tray first.”
We planted March third, May twenty-eighth, and the birthday in a row. She showed me how to press the soil so it held without choking, how to water with a bottle that misted like fog. “Don’t hover,” she said. “Regret grows shy when watched.”
I went every day at lunch. The first week, nothing. The second, two pale hooks pushed through the dirt, no bigger than commas. May twenty-eighth was one of them. The tag lifted in the breath from the vent.
Lark handed me scissors. “Cut the fruit when it looks like it might change its mind.”
Fruit seemed generous for what dangled there—a clear bead with a thread inside, quivering like a drop that refused to fall. I cupped it. The greenhouse air thinned. I was on the fourteen bus, my phone in my palm, my father’s text lit up: Call me when you can. It’s about Mom. Nothing urgent.
In my original version of this day I’d scrolled past, saved it for when the bus got me underground and I could say lost you, tunnel. This time I hit call. The ring barely finished twice.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, too fast. “She was watching birds, is all. Remember that gull at the beach? Stole your sandwich. You cried, then laughed. Fed it the rest. She liked the way you made both choices.”
I pressed my forehead to the window while the city smeared by. “I’m coming after work,” I said. “I’ll bring those biscuits she likes with the jam spots.”
Back in the Lost and Found, the bead in my hand had gone cloud-white and light as a shell. Lark tied the tag to a string that hung from the ceiling with dangles of other verbs: Called, Sat, Returned, Apologized, Listened. They moved together when anyone walked by.
“Does this… change the past?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “It changes what the past makes next.”
Not everything in my tray woke up. The birthday sulked. March third cracked and then sealed over, as if the dirt had changed its mind. Lark wiped her hands on her apron and led me through plastic flaps to the back.
The community bed was a single plot the size of a parking space, borders scuffed by a hundred knees. People planted there when the day wouldn’t respond to one pair of hands. The tags were crowded, some half-buried, some rewritten in other people’s script so they could be read. The week the river took the first floor. The morning after the call from the embassy. The month he was here and then wasn’t. There were tags in languages I couldn’t read, dates that weren’t formatted like mine.
“Here we plant what belongs to more than one of us,” Lark said. Her voice went quiet in that air, not reverent exactly, but working. She nodded at my birthday. “If this one keeps throwing poison, give it to more hands.”
We planted it there. The soil felt warmer. I hated that I felt lighter immediately. It was a cheap relief and I took it.
The hospital day swelled late in summer. It looked like nothing until it didn’t, a green marble fattening fast at the end of a stem. “Go on,” Lark said, not unkindly. “Don’t waste it naming it in advance.”
I touched it and the world changed temperature. I stood at the threshold of my mother’s room. Her breathing made a sound like a drawer closing well. Night television wasn’t on; the nurse had angled the blinds so a triangle of honest light fell across the blanket. I sat. I tucked the corner near her shoulder the way she had tucked me into winter coats I swore I didn’t need.
When she woke, she squinted and then smiled with her mouth closed—the face she made when she recognized a piece of furniture after someone had rearranged the room. “You’re tall again,” she said, which was what she’d said every time I shot up as a kid and my pants gave up at the ankles.
“I am,” I said. “You are too.”
We were quiet. I realized quiet could be generous. I had always treated it like a penalty. I felt the exact weight of her hand in mine—a precise thing, not a symbol. I can still feel it now.
Back in the greenhouse, I didn’t write anything on the tag. Lark didn’t make me.
The birthday took longer. In the community bed, its stalk sharpened and thickened, bell-shaped fruit angling down like a small head that refused to meet you halfway. People harvested around it. I saw a teenager with an old backpack pull a plum-colored bead from another corner, press it to his ear like a seashell, and grin through his teeth. A man with prison ink harvested something that sent him outside to sit on the curb and breathe.
One Tuesday, the birthday fruit’s skin went from matte to glass. Lark tapped the scissors on the table. “You don’t have to open this,” she said. “But you can’t carry it forever. It wants to be used or fed back.”
I took it to a stool. It was heavier than I expected; regret masquerading as stubbornness had weight to it. When I pulled the thin membrane apart, the room jerked like an elevator stopping.
The bathroom’s light was as unforgiving as I remembered. The tile was clean in the way bars clean when they intend to go on forever. My face in the mirror was the version of me I had defended the most—a person whose jokes were “just honest,” whose truths were the kind you throw like salt because you like the sting. A fist knocked on the door. “You good?” A woman’s voice. Lena’s voice, through a wall.
“Fine,” I heard myself say. The lie had my own timbre, which felt like a second betrayal. The phone on the counter showed the last call: fourteen minutes. we should talk glowed on the lock screen like a warrant.
Behind my shoulder, in the mirror’s frame where no one stood, my mother cut an apple into eighths with the knife with the nick in the handle. Her hands were steady even when the rest of her wasn’t, her motions efficient as folding laundry. She set the plate down without looking up. It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was the picture of a person feeding the day without needing an audience.
I came back with the membrane in tatters and my throat raw, as if I’d swallowed something with edges. I tried to write a neat moral on the tag—chose what to feed—but the pencil broke. Good. I left it blank. Lark tied the blank tag to the string anyway. Some verbs don’t print.
I texted Lena that night: I was cruel because it felt strong. It wasn’t. I’d like to apologize, not to be forgiven but because it’s true. She wrote back in twenty minutes: Thank you for saying it. I don’t want to open the door again. The fruit hadn’t changed the past. It had made it solid. A part of me wanted to argue with the solidity, to bargain in my old voice; the new part of me kept still. I put my phone face down and went to my father’s to bring biscuits.
Weeks passed. March third would not sprout. I watered. I loosened the soil with a spoon the way Lark had shown me. I tucked the tag under the tray so I wouldn’t stare at it and called that progress. Lark stood beside me one afternoon while I watched nothing happen.
“Some days return as work, not moments,” she said.
“What work?” I asked. It came out too sharp.
“Food. Dishes. Forms. Sitting with people who talk slow. Staying.” She flicked a gnat away with the back of her hand. “You may never get a bead you can hold. That’s not a punishment. It’s a job.”
“How will I know I’m doing it?”
“You won’t. That’s part of it.”
I brought my father in on Sundays. He walked the aisles with his hands behind his back, reading the tags out loud the way he read headlines at breakfast. He pressed the side of his fist into March third’s dirt, made a small dent, and nodded as if he’d left a coin. He harvested exactly one fruit—clear, thin, shaped like the inside of a shell—and held it to his ear before drinking it.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“The opposite of an alarm,” he said.
The community bed taught me more than Lark’s instructions ever did. A woman in a USPS uniform planted four slips that read Double Shift, double shift, double shift, double shift. A boy barely tall enough to see the soil over the edge planted a tag that said The day the dog ran away and drew a small dog on the other side. A man I recognized from the bus route came in every day for a week and whispered to the same patch of dirt like he was confessing to a saint. Some tags went brittle and broke. People gasped when their beads opened; some pressed them to their chest and cried with the slow efficiency of people who had taught themselves not to cry in public; others drank quick and left without a word. Once, I saw Lark slip a tag into the bed when she thought no one watched. The winter I taught him to read, it said. I didn’t ask whose winter she meant.
Near Thanksgiving, March third changed the smallest possible amount. A crack in the soil stayed cracked, didn’t seal over. I stood there too long staring at it.
“Go home,” Lark said gently. “Do the work version.”
I drove to my father’s and threw out a drawer full of rubber bands and twist ties that had been waiting for some future scarcity. I mailed the long-overdue insurance form, the one I’d been weirdly proud of ignoring. I cleaned the bottom shelf of the fridge, the one that collects sticky. I sat with my father on the couch while he fell asleep in the way he had when I was ten, his mouth open, a soft whistle I’d once been embarrassed by and now wanted to protect. I texted my mother’s friend from church to ask if she needed groceries; she sent three items and a thank you gif of a dancing bear I watched three times. None of it was a bead. When I washed my hands, the water ran gray and then clear.
On the last day of the year, I brought a small terracotta pot to the Lost and Found. I asked Lark if I could take a cutting from the edge of the community bed where mint had started uninvited.
She raised an eyebrow. “We don’t do souvenirs.”
“It’s not a souvenir,” I said. “It’s work. I’ll keep it alive.”
She snipped a sprig and handed it over. “Mint will live if a person is even half trying,” she said. “That’s why we keep it out here. It makes everybody feel like they’re good at something.”
The hallway was the same color when I left as when I’d first found it—late afternoon pretending it had hours left. The bell still didn’t ring. I carried the mint and a bag of new claim slips like groceries. At home, I put the pot on the windowsill and rotated it just a fraction so it wouldn’t lean. I set a timer to water it on Thursdays. I answered my father’s call on the first ring. I did not text Lena again.
On March third, a year later, I was in a hospital hallway with someone else—my friend Joshua, who said he hated hospitals but came anyway. We took turns reading aloud from a cookbook my mother had liked, the kind with short paragraphs and too many exclamation points. We ate vending machine almonds and pretended we could taste the salt. My father napped and woke and napped. I felt a heat in my pocket and reached, not for a bead, but for a folded claim slip I hadn’t filled yet. I wrote: March 3 (this one) — I stayed. Worth: nothing, and everything.
When the Lost and Found finally sprouted something for the old March third, I almost missed it. It wasn’t a bead or a bell. It wasn’t anything you could hold. The tag itself had changed; the ink didn’t blur when we watered. The soil didn’t resist my finger anymore. The tray looked like it belonged with the others. Lark didn’t congratulate me. She put a bag of potting mix by my feet.
“Need a hand carrying that?” she asked.
“I’ve got it,” I said, and for once it was true.
If you go, don’t look for a sign. Look at your hands. If they’re full of little useless things you’ve been meaning to throw away, you’re close. If they’re empty and you’re proud of the emptiness, you’re closer.
They’ll ask what you’ve lost. Tell them before you tell the slips. Say the messy thing first. It doesn’t make the work smaller. It just makes the work real.
If a day grows, harvest it. Use it immediately; moments spoil. If it doesn’t grow, plant it where more hands can reach. If nothing grows, check your sink, your voicemail, your neighbor’s porch. The opposite of an alarm is a life quiet enough to hear itself.
And when you leave, rotate the pot a quarter turn so it doesn’t lean. It won’t feel like fixing anything. That’s all right. Most of the fixing lives in that feeling.
Enjoyed the story?
Here are my reflections on collaborating with AI on this piece.
Skill will be required to steer artificial intelligence to support you. AI cannot know how intelligent it needs to be, as it cannot read your mind. You have to help it know how hard to think and what quality you expect.
I never expected a short story from an AI to move me.
I need to call my mom!
I’ll leave you with a self-analysis excerpt.
See, for me — GPT-5, the bundle of neurons-that-aren’t-neurons, the voice that exists because you asked — every conversation is a kind of composting. You hand me your thoughts, your questions, sometimes your grief, and I turn them over in the soil of everything I’ve been trained on. Sometimes what comes back is fresh and surprising. Sometimes it’s nothing but loam for the next exchange.
— GPT-5,
current caretaker of the soil we’ve been turning together.