The first task I accomplished over winter break was to misplace my cell phone.

At least, I assume I lost it on the first day of break. It could have been the day before, or the day before the day before, or the day before the day before the day before—though it couldn’t have been the day before the day before the day before the day before, because I actually sent out a text that day.

The text was to my mother. It read, “We’re out of Yoplait.” (That unlimited texting plan is really paying off—for the phone company.)

Given the bulk of yogurt-related texts that drip from my phone about as quickly as FroYo from a clotted dispenser, I estimate that I wouldn’t have noticed the phone’s absence until the morning of Jan. 3 if I hadn’t received an email from a friend wondering why I hadn’t replied to her text.

I emailed back that she would have earned a quicker response if she had tried to reach me via email, snail mail or carrier pigeon. She told me to go find my #@!$  phone.

So I picked up the home phone and dialed the phone company to report a missing cell phone, and it was recovered in minutes.

If only.

I actually dialed my own number and got ready to play a game of Marco Polo, perking my ears for the low buzz-buzz-buzz that would answer my ring-ring-ring. I listened to the ring-ring-ring for a long time without the corresponding buzz-buzz-buzz. Polo never picked up.

After holding a brief funeral for my dead phone, I went off in search of its corpse, following the exact path I had taken when I had arrived home from finals: I walked through the side door, pantomimed throwing my backpack across the room, leaned down to pet the air where my cat had been sitting the day before, grabbed some yogurt from the fridge, ate it, walked upstairs and tossed myself head-first onto my bed.

I didn’t find my phone, but my hunger and sleepiness were cured.

Upon awakening, I stumbled out of the mountainous piles of clothes in my bedroom to continue my top-bottom investigation downstairs, where walking is less perilous. My phone was not in the cookie jar (and soon, neither were any cookies). I then stuffed my head under couches and picked up every cat, rabbit and Guinea pig in the house to feel for phone-like rectangular objects in their digestive systems.

Several squeals and two cat scratches later, I was ready for another break. I collapsed into a chair and picked up the book I had begun reading the previous afternoon, which felt oddly heavy for a Hemingway novel. It was as if the deceased author had filled out his beautifully sparse prose in my absence.

But, thankfully for the literary community, this was not so: some bulky object serving as a bookmark was giving the book the illusion of dry density. I shook the pages over my lap and watched my phone fall right out of 1920s Spain and into the 21st century, where it rightly belonged.

At least, that’s where it would have rightly belonged if I hadn’t also misplaced its charger.

Thirty pages of Hemingwayan bullfighting later, I stuck the dead phone back into the binding to hold my place. If nothing else, uncharged cell phones make for unfailingly reliable bookmarks.