I Think My Girlfriend Pulled Off An Elaborate Heist In Order To Win An Argument

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It seemed simple.

“No,” I explained for what felt like the hundredth time. “I don’t know where your curling iron is.”

She refused to believe me.

“Seriously,” I kept explaining. “I’ve looked everywhere and it’s just… it’s just not here.”

Admittedly, I’m not the best at looking for things. I’m not sure whether it’s my self-diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder or my lack of motivation, but I once spent ten minutes looking for a Snickers bar that was actually in my hand. Sure, I was 8 years old at the time but it was a good opportunity for an early diagnosis of being “bad at looking for things.”

It’s a problem that’s lingered with me for years. I’ve always considered myself to be an “out of sight, out of mind” type of person who would rather kiss something goodbye than put in the effort of getting it back. You can buy new socks, but you can’t get the time back that you spend hounding your laundry room for them only to come up emptyhanded.

It was for this reason that she refused to believe that her curling iron was simply missing.

The backstory is straight-forward. We did a lot of traveling over the holidays, thus we shared a lot of packing space together. Not to brag, but I bought the largest Patagonia Black Hole Duffel that one can buy. As an avid and passionate over-packer, it only made sense to get the largest vessel money can buy. After all, who knows when I’ll want to wear a short-sleeve linen shirt or an oatmeal-colored sweater? I need to be prepared for everything life throws my way.

With that being said, her curling iron made its way into my luggage at some point. When, you ask? Well, we may never know. She put it there after I had completed my section of the packing and a curling iron is simply something that I would never think twice about. Or the conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that she never put it in my bag at all – that it solely existed in her bag and she lost it.

She, on the other hand, realized something when our travels had finally come to a close. Given that we’re currently trudging through long-distance, she couldn’t look for this curling iron herself. It would require a six-hour round trip just to find something that costs all of $20 on Amazon Prime.

“Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere?” she maintained. “It can’t just *disappear* out of thin air.”

Yet I maintained. I stayed the course. I would have loved to have found it in my duffel bag rather than go on and on about a stupid curling iron, but there I sat on FaceTime confronting the same question for the better part of ten minutes.

“It’s gone,” I broke to her. “I think it’s time to buy a new one.”

I had looked in this bag on three separate occasions. Yes, it is called a “Black Hole Duffel,” but it’s not actually a black hole. It’s a gigantic polyester sack with few to zero pockets where things can hide. After looking one last time (at her request), I confirmed that the curling iron was as good as gone.

Well, that is until this past weekend.

You see, there I was moving the bag from the floor of my bedroom to the floor of my closet. A simple task that carried more weight than just the bag itself. She had gotten into town the night before but I thought I’d do a little Saturday sweep to ensure my room was clean enough to coexist with another human without feeling as though we were existing on piles of my laundry and belongings.

It was at the moment when I picked up the bag that I thought, “There’s something in here.” Shit.

I don’t need to explain what this was because you know what it was. The goddamn curling iron.

At first, I felt a deep feeling of shame. How could I look in this bag on three different occasions and not find it? How could I be so dense that this curling iron existed just feet away from where I slept night in and night out? How could I find it when I wasn’t looking for it rather than when I was looking only for it?

Then everything clicked. I’d been duped. As I pulled it out of the bag, I said, “Hey Sally,” before trailing off and waiting for her response.

“Yes?” she said from downstairs.

“You’re going to kill me.” I said this in an effort to play the victim; to make her feel badly for me that I had tried so hard to find it the first time.

She knew exactly what I was referring to without me even having to explain it.

“You found the damn curling iron, didn’t you?”

I walked downstairs with the same shame that a dog has when he clearly knows he’s done something wrong. With the curling iron in hand, I tip-toed down the stairs trying to piece everything together. It simply made no sense to me that this stupid contraption appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

I knew it was a bad idea, but I had no other choice but to ask her a question that was simply begging to get off my mind.

“Did you… did you plant this in my bag?”

She was baffled to the point of laughter. Real or fake, I’ll never know how genuine or conniving that laughter actually is.

“Do you seriously think I’d plant a curling iron in your bag just to win the argument? Don’t be absurd.”

I ran the answers through my head. Answers that I knew I shouldn’t give her, but answers that I thought I had a legitimate case for giving. Yes, I did think she planted it in the bag. I still think she planted it there, in fact.

After all, it makes too much sense. How could I go a month without spotting this curling iron until the very weekend she decided to come into town? It simply seemed like too much of a coincidence that it appeared the morning after she had spent the night, luggage and all.

“You totally planted it in there,” I said in disbelief. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have accused her of pulling an Ocean’s 11-esque heist just to win an argument over a $20 beauty apparatus, but I’m a prideful guy who thrives on being right. I couldn’t let it fester. “Serenity now” and all that.

She wrote it off quickly. Almost too quickly, if you ask me. Denying the claim and moving on was natural for her, but almost too natural. Even three days later, I still sit here imagining every step she’d need to take in order to bring the curling iron from her apartment three hours away to my house, take it out while I was in the shower, and bury it deep in the depths of my duffel bag only to let me find at the most opportune moment. Is she crazy enough to do it, or am I crazy enough to conjure up this situation in my head solely so I can win the argument?

Well, it’s hard to say. But just know that this isn’t the last the world will hear of this. It’s a curling iron that will live in infamy. My eyes are wide open. .

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Will

Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.

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