Moments. This last week has been filled with them.

All days are composed of moments, but most of them are mundane and just keep time moving forward. There is the moment while I am standing in line at the cafeteria with my grilled cheese sandwich. There is the moment when I ask the Dunkin’ Donuts guy if I can put $.28 on my credit card. (Answer: yes.) There is the moment when I am sitting with my nails under the dryer at manicure shop. There is the moment that I wake up at 1AM and pull my e-reader out from under my pillow, my body feeling as if it has had a nice nap, even though it is the middle of the night. And there is that moment when I am laughing out loud, alone in my apartment, to another rerun of Impractical Jokers.

These are the moments that come and go and we don’t think twice about them.

This last week though, has been filled with Moments- earning the respect of a proper noun.

There was the moment when I learned, via 11:50PM Tweet that our embassy in Caracas was going to suspend all operations and the last of our American colleagues were coming home. There was the moment when I saw pictures of the flag that flew so boldly over our hilltop embassy come down and fold into a tight triangle. There were the moments that same morning when I walked to work looking like a crazy lady with silent tears (and supposedly water proof mascara) spilling down my face as my WhatsApp was filled with photos of the final stages of our embassy closing. There was the moment when I met our returning colleagues at Dulles and was able to give them each a hug and thank them for sticking out the last seven challenging weeks. And there was the moment when I watched as our chargé d’affaires handed over the embassy flag to the Secretary of State, telling him he fully expected it back very soon.

Those are Moments with a capital M.

I knew the week had been rough, but I didn’t start thinking about it through this lens of moments until tonight. As I was cocooned out on the couch under my weighted blanket, watching some quality TV on  Hulu (The Voice – don’t judge- I’m secretly in love with Adam Levine, although I do wish he hadn’t gone with the stupid knuckle tattoos) my mind was wandering and it suddenly came to a halt, as if my brain slammed into a glass door. (This is an apt simile since there was a period in my childhood that I seemed to have made full-face contact with sliding glass doors on a semi-regular basis.)

Zugly.

I know. That word means nothing to most people, but to understand the sheer devastation that this seemingly not-a-word-word brought on, we need to go back more than three decades.

Pinpointing the exact Christmas that Zugly showed up in my life is not easy, as is seems he has been a part of it forever. (Google tells me 1986 would have been the year, so that puts me at the ripe old age of seven.) Zugly is an adorably hideous monster that has been by my side for years. He has a plum-purple head with an enormous zucchini-like nose that flops around his face. (Flaccid would be a great term for it, but the connotations conjured by that single adjective take minds to a place that are not fitting for the childhood pal that he was!) For the first week or so of his life, he had these zombie-esque eyes that were ringed in green and yellow circles, but after a few nights in my grandma’s basement, getting smashed against the concrete wall, his psychedelic paint quickly wore off and he spent the next 30-plus years with the white orbs of a blind monster. Sporting a handful of pink-yarn hairs and a single pirate-like gold earring, he is a fashion statement like none other.

He might not be pretty, but he has been at my side through thick and thin. He was my go-to as a kid when I was afraid of the dark (I’d take myself to “Zugly-land,” an imaginary land inhabited by his fellow kind-hearted ogres to help ward off the monsters that might be lurking in the closet or under my bed. Ironic, I know, but irony as a literary device was lost on my elementary self.) He was a listening ear when middle school wasn’t always kind. (Put those weird cauliflower ears to work!) He was a pillow when I had my wisdom teeth out. He’s been to college in Utah, study abroad in the Dominican Republic, on vacations around the world and on four Foreign Service tours. (I think he has spent time on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. I guess I should have taking him to CLO training in Johannesburg a few years ago.) He was evacuated from Peace Corps China when our tour came to an abrupt end a few months early due to the massive 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  And he has frightened more than one hotel housekeeper around the world. (I always love the ones who give him a bit of extra loving care, propping him up in the middle of a fancy king-sized bed as it he owned the room.)

But back to moments. I had another one tonight. Not a mundane cafeteria-time moment. And not a gut-wrenchingly emotional moment.

This was a quiet and personal Moment.

As our ordered departure from Caracas continues and its length and uncertainty are compounded, there is a part of me that fears I will never again see the things I left behind in the city. I’ve had this thought multiple times over the last seven weeks, but until recently, I discarded it as just unnecessary anxiety.

But the “what-ifs” are starting to creep in.

What if we don’t ever go back? (Fairly likely.)

What if we can’t get our stuff out? (I have a lot of faith in our team and the system, but this is a pretty unprecedented situation.)

What if all my clothes and shoes and books and typewriters and photos never make it back to the United States? (It is seemingly just stuff, but it is also so much more than that.)

And then, following that line of thought, as my brain made a mental walk through our apartment, my mind’s eye landed on Zugly.

What if Zugly never comes home?

I know how dramatic that sounds. The intensity could be pulled right out of one of the early afternoon soap operas that used to keep me entertained during my summer babysitting gigs. Drama to make a llama cringe.

But don’t discount the force of that moment- realizing that a possession, although it has zero monetary value but endless sentimental value, could be gone forever. There is no replacement. Clements might give me some money to cover the cost of a new Zugly (and all my other household items), but no eBay Zugly can replace the one with the irremovable bandage goo-stain on his nose from when I tried to cure his wart issue. No eBay Zugly will have his stuffing smashed out of his belly, making a perfect pillow, and into his feet so they balloon out like he is in the early stages of elephantiasis. And no eBay Zugly will have the rubber band of unknown age that holds together his fashionable bubble gum pink braid.

How Zugly got left behind is a much longer story, but one that boils down to optimism that we would return to our home and jobs in Caracas within a short time span. It is the same reason I didn’t pack up my desk and my wonderful colleague had to do it for me, emptying my drawers and shelves and files the last day the embassy was open for business. (My apologies for whatever weird things you found, Gerard!) I honestly believed that we were walking away for a few weeks or a few months at the most. I thought Zugly (and everything else) would be there waiting for me to return after a bit of grumpy time spent in the cold of a Washington D.C. winter.

It now appears that my DC moments are going to add up to more than I ever anticipated.

Moments are how we live our lives. They are hard to measure and easy to discount. But whether the moment is mundane or monumental, they are the building blocks of our lives. And, dramatic as it sounds, I’d love to have Zugly along for the next three decades of my moments. In a world that has gone Marie Kondo-crazy, this delightfully hideous monster sparks my joy.