It was as I sat on the bus that I noticed my thumbs hovered involuntarily above the cracked screen of my mother's old flip phone. We'd had the conversation - or at least a heated monologue - about the futility of paying full price for a smartphone and, by extension, all its attendant costs. My mind had latched onto it the way it did with other scraps of family lore: 'your father never learned how to do that, either'. The thought sent me digging through the pocket of my worn jeans for the phone, fingers instinctively seeking out the tiny, tactile keypad and then I recalled I'd misplaced it last week along with everything else in my backpack. I wondered whether it was lost forever like an unremarked breath or somehow magically reunited with me in this cramped, fluorescent-lit bus on a drizzly Wednesday morning.
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