It still feels incomplete

I think about it, more often than you would think. Not for revenge or with a sense of indig­nity, but with curios­ity and dis­con­tent­ment. Did they know or care? Would it still make a profit? Did they think they would be able to work it out somehow?

When I lived in San Diego with my par­ents I had a prob­lem hold­ing onto my car stereos. In fact, I had three stolen car stereos dur­ing a short time. It was rough. I looked into dif­fer­ent expen­sive prod­ucts includ­ing an alarm sys­tem for my car that would notify a key­chain don­gle if any­thing was amiss.

I started tak­ing the face­plate into my room at night. It seemed like this would be the proper deter­rent to fur­ther theft. I thought that if some­one were think­ing about tak­ing my car stereo, they would look inside and see the face­plate miss­ing and move on. Or they would still break in and look in the usual spots that they knew their vic­tims would put the face­plate – in the glove com­part­ment, under the seat, in the cen­ter con­sole – and not find­ing it they would leave the stereo and move on to the next car.

But this did not work. One night, despite my logic that a face­plate­less car stereo would be worth­less, some­one stole my car stereo. I think about this a lot. Did they go through all the effort of tak­ing the stereo out and then real­ize that the face­plate wasn’t even in the car? Were they pissed? But why did they take it still?

I feel bad about this. I’m not even upset about the stereo being stolen any­more. I’m upset that for­ever the face­plate and stereo will be sep­a­rated. It depresses me. I held onto the face­plate for a long time. It seemed too valu­able of an object to just throw away. I wanted to some­how con­nect them again. No ques­tions asked. It wasn’t even nec­es­sary for it to be returned to me.

Even­tu­ally, I think the face­plate was thrown out or was taken to a thrift store to sit and be use­less. I’m not even sure. But I hope that wher­ever the worth­less face­plate and the empty stereo went that they were destroyed and don’t con­tinue to exist.