I walked out of the ballet studio happily chatting with my mom, phone in hand. Class was perfect, the weather was perfect, life was perfect.

But within five minutes, my phone was gone. No, it wasn’t stolen or taken as evidence by the FBI, and I certainly wasn’t mugged. It was lost; I lost my phone in the twenty steps from the ballet studio to the car.

I got home, still perfectly oblivious to gravity of the situation, set my bag down and casually rummaged through it knowing that I would soon find my phone. The rummaging soon turned frantic as one thing became clear: I, Bryn Gallagher, was phone-less.

You know that hopeless, sinking feeling you get when you’ve lost something of some sort of assigned importance? I had that feeling. I had lost my crummy, bright green phone that I had to rubber band to the charger, that little outdated piece of equipment that I loved to complain about.

At once, the Gallagher family search party was dispatched and all the usual places were investigated: under the bed, under the couch, in between the car seats, but there was no luck.

Now in a full-fledged panic, Mom and I got in the car to check the parking lot at the ballet studio, not there. Then we looked inside the ballet studio, another no. Dejected, we packed up and headed home with the hollow feeling of loss growing painfully.

That was it, I was going back to the time before instant communication. I might have to, Heaven forbid, actually call people on the landline.

Finally, after trying everything I remembered out of the blue that I had turned my phone’s sound back on. I called it, breathlessly awaiting the dial tone and the ring. The seconds seemed like years until it finally rang.

For as long as I have had my phone, I have hated the ringtone with a burning passion. But this time that terribly organized jumble of notes may as well have been the sound of an angel chorus; it was the music I desperately wanted to hear.

On the first call, I narrowed my phone’s location to my ballet bag, from there it took three more calls to determine that it was in my pointe shoe. I went through all that panic for a phone that was sitting in my pointe shoe the entire night.

There are several things that could be learned from this, I suppose.

First off, you shouldn’t get so stressed about your upcoming SAT that you don’t actually think about what is going on at the moment (to think I drove in this state). Secondly, make sure you look very closely for what you need, it might be closer than you think.