Take Two - edited version...

Search Engine
Fuck.
I’ve lost my keys, I need to get to work and there’s no one here to shout at. I keep going back to the telephone table with the key hook. Why aren’t they there? I put them there every night on my way in. Why, when I’m running late for work, aren’t they there? Why? I glare accusing at the empty hook, but the keys don’t materialise. Bastards.
He always kept his keys on a hook, and I always resisted his calm orderly ways. Did I do that just to spite him – start a fight, light a spark - and was that the beginning of the end? These days I’ve started using the hook. He’s not around to say I told you so. My brain creaks into motion, probing the edges of my silent evening, trying to see the picture of my last-night world. Where, where, where did I put my keys down?
I tip my handbag out on the coffee table, pens clattering out like a game of pick-up-sticks. Where do they go when I need one? I frisk coats I’ve not worn in months, lift up magazines, probe the folds of drawn curtains, scan my small studio flat and see nothing but a small and cluttered life. I pull the sofa apart and take out my frustration on the cushions, stack things in new piles, open drawers; make more mess. The faster I move, the more often I check my watch, the further away I am from getting to work on time. Finally I sit down on my demolished sofa, on the verge of tears. I’m all alone now, only I can fix this and I can’t do it, can’t cope alone, can’t even do a simple thing like get myself out the front door now he’s gone.
A-ha. Got it. I open the fridge door, and there they are, right in the centre of the otherwise empty top shelf like a winning entry in the Turner Prize. I’d come home last night via Sainsbury’s, unloaded my meagre bounty and put my keys on the shelf while I was doing it.
After the tears and silent tantrums, I’m only five minutes late and I power walk to work. So many searches in life. These days, we trust Google to find anything we need - a new job or a washing machine, the latest book or relationship. Take the dating website I signed up for last month, all those tick boxes and criteria, the logical search, the structured way to find a man. Should searching for something abstract and intangible, like love be approached the same way as finding keys, plodding, methodical and still littered with tantrums.
A lot of my friends are in positive relationships and I used to hope that their luck in love will rub off on me, but looking there is just staring at an empty key hook. All my friends have keys too, but that didn’t help me this morning, none of them fit my front door. I think about how things hide other things, all those pens somewhere under the accumulated rubble in my handbag and wonder if all my loving friendships are holding me back from finding a man like a soft comfortable haystack.
Even when keys are lost you know they exist out there somewhere waiting for you to find them, but the same is not true of love, whatever dating agencies and websites would like you to believe - pay just £30 a month and we’ll put you in touch with the man of your dreams, he’s here, really he is...Those websites are like the pockets of coats you’ve not worn in months, nothing you really need could possibly be found there.
I turn the corner and see the office building I work in loom on the other side of the road. I wait for the traffic to subside and my day to start; I need to screw on my professional head and rein in these rambling thoughts the same way I wrestle my tangled hair into a smart clip each morning. Lost love is not like lost keys, it is no use retracing your steps, going back to where you last remember having it. All this searching could go on even though there’s nothing really to find because maybe, unlike my keys, he’s not out there somewhere waiting to be found and I’ll just spend my days frantically upending my life like a loosely built sofa.
Even if he is out there, he’ll be sitting in an empty fridge.
Fuck.