When you have an important document where do you put it? Somewhere safe, right? Has anyone else had the experience of putting an important item somewhere safe…only to completely forget whereabouts they have put it? I can’t be the only one. I have had this happen to me multiple times…over and over again. And last night, this was taken to a new extreme.

I thought I had lost my DS-160 form. This is one of the most important and precious forms that I need for my year abroad. I tried not to panic and to calmly go about searching the entire house for it, without alerting my parents to the fact I was looking for something. When midnight arrived and I had still had not found my form I began to panic. Tears were running down my face as I frantically emptied cabinet after cabinet (my parents were now safe and soundly in bed) as I desperately searched for my form all around the house. Then horror struck. You know the sick kind of horror that eats away at your emotions and makes you want to just curl up in a ball and cry. The paper bin. The paper bin. I had recently emptied my bedroom of all things rubbish. I have come back from University and in an attempt to fit everything back in my room I had had to have a massive clear out. I remember putting multiple documents in the paper bin and I couldn’t help but believe I had put a certain brown envelope containing a certain form into it. And tomorrow….well technically that day, what was going to be taken away by the bin men? Yep, the paper bin.

So that is why I found myself at one in the morning, searching through the paper bin, in search for my DS-160 form. Oh my life….

I didn’t find it. Frustratingly I didn’t find it. But I did feel a small sense of relief that I had taken the time to search through the paper bin even though I hadn’t found it. Then I began to feel fear that I had accidently put it in the bin. However, I put the feeling to the back of my mind and decided if I was going to search through the bins, I could leave that till the following day.

I walked sadly up to bed. I thought I had put it somewhere safe. That’s all I could remember about the form. I remember thinking “I’ll just put this somewhere safe because it is so important.” We had never been told what would happen if we lost out DS-160 form. There was no cute anecdote about someone who had done the same recently. There was no reassurance. Simply my year abroad adviser had passed it across and said “Now you only have one of these, so look after it.” I began to imagine trying to explain to everyone how I had switched to a normal History degree because I had failed to follow one instruction ‘look after it’. As I climbed into bed I glanced at the small filing cabinet by the side of my bed which is transparent and the only one I hadn’t pulled everything out of and decorated the floor with its contents. I hadn’t emptied this one because it is small and full of simply all my Year One work.

Yeah there was a brown envelope just visible on the top pull-out tray – The Important Documents Tray.