I have recently become a victim of theft.
Not of anything so vulgar or replaceable as money or as bureaucratically infuriating and costly as my “identity,” but something more intimate and personal. I was going to write something, perhaps a book, on a topic of peculiar fascination, wrapped in a narrative conceit involving a personal quest. I nurtured and cultivated this idea for years, only to discover that someone had taken it. Down to small details! And not just the same project and quest, but at the same time of life I’d started it. This larcenous author even nicked my idea of having a debilitating fever in Munich, where I’d experienced a derailing bout of COVID in 2023. It was as though someone had seen into my drafts folder, my text messages, even my private conversations, and turned them into a book before I could.
To make matters worse, this idea was stolen from me ten whole years before I had it. Outrageous. It was such a flagrant theft that all it took to detect it was a belated subject-word search of my local suburban library’s catalog.
