Originally published in The Clifton Courier, June 7, 2017

I had a very emotional day last week.

It was a Monday. It was cold. I hadn’t found $400 on the ground on my way to work. So it was already not the best day.

But then it came to lunchtime, and things took a turn for the worst. I looked in the fridge for the container I’d placed there earlier that morning. It wasn’t there. I looked again. I looked in the other fridge. And then I saw the washing up pile, and noticed my container sitting there, empty.

I knew it was my container because there were traces of my lunch remaining. A scraping of hummus. A spec of spinach. The oil from my roasted sweet potato.

Then it hit me: my lunch was gone.

Look, logic tells me was probably an accident. I highly doubt my container was maliciously emptied because I like to think humanity isn’t capable of that level of evil.

But that didn’t change the fact that my lunch was no more.

I went downstairs to the food court under my building and walked around in a daze.

I was lost. I was broken. I was empty – literally, I’m not sure how long it takes the human stomach to send food on its way down the digestive tract, but as I’d had breakfast at 6am and it was now 2pm, I’d be willing to wager there wasn’t much left in the tank.

My building is circular, so I was actually walking in circles at that point. I almost started to cry. I considered calling Mum.

Knowing nothing the takeaway food outlets surrounding me could replace what was lost, I ended up buying some protein balls and slumped back to my desk in defeat.

“You hear of these things happening to other people,” I actually heard myself saying afterwards, “but you never it expect it to happen to you.”

Dramatic? Sure.

Trite? That’s generally who I am.

Insulting to people who have actual real problems? Probably.

But I was hungry. Show me one person who doesn’t get melodramatic, devoid of original thought or slightly offensive when they’re hungry, and you’ll show me a liar. I didn’t have the fuel to power brain to be aware of how much of a stain I was.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Maybe there isn’t one. Sometimes things don’t have a rhyme or reason.

But I’m determined to take something away from this, because I can’t accept that fact that I lost my lunch AND missed out on a life lesson.

So here is what I’ve learned. I held it together. I didn’t call Mum sobbing… unlike I did that time I was hit by a magpie. I didn’t even let one single tear drop from my eyes. I didn’t snap. And I carried on.

I also got a column out of it, so in a way I really should thank whoever was behind this.

Whoever you are, know that you’re forgiven.