A true story from Kuala Lumpur.

The dress is a loose, backless thing that ties around the neck and falls just above the knees. It is only twenty ringgits, but looks like one of those expensive dresses that you eye longingly in the shop window of a tiny vintage shop in downtown Los Angeles. Furthermore, there is something about the decorative blue and orange patterns on the fabric that fulfills my vague ideas of what a bargain dress from Malaysia should look like--exotic, skin-baring and tropical. The kind of dress you wear with sunglasses and a tan that your friends ogle over when you come home bearing presents and stories.

I find it in some nameless store in some big mall plaza in Bukit Buntang and it is love at first sight.

Hours later, we are being driven home in a taxi cab by some fat, Chinese man whose thick accent we can barely understand. I pay for the fare and as we are walking into the dormitory, I suddenly realize that I left the shopping bag with my beautiful dress in the cab. The cab, of course, has already driven away by the time we run back out to where we were dropped off.

"Well, there are two things you can do right now," my friend says. "You can either say that it wasn't mean to be and leave it at that. Or we can try to go back to Bukit Buntang right now and try to find the taxi driver with your dress."

I agonize about it for maybe five seconds. I say: "I want my fucking dress."

So it's maybe one in the morning and we are driving back to where we were just thirty minutes before, for quite possibly the most ridiculously impossible task ever. I am pacing up and down the streets around busy intersections and taxi stands searching high and low for a red cab that is driven by a fat Chinese man. I walk up to a hired cab in the middle of the street and open the passenger door, only to find that the driver is someone I've never seen before. At one point, my friend interrupts a small cluster of Indian taxi drivers who are killing time by their unoccupied cabs. We ask them if they happen to know a co-worker who is a fat Chinese man.

They laugh in disbelief and ask us, "Do you know his cab number? Do you have his number?"

We don't, of course.

We give up at some point and go home a second time. I keep half-hoping for some bizarre miracle that will deliver the dress in my hands again, but of course that is never going to happen. Maybe, my friend says, another woman will come across the dress and it will fit her perfectly and a man who sees her in this dress will fall in love with her. They will get married and raise a child who will find the cure to AIDS, and it all wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for my stupid careless mistake of leaving the dress in the car.

Maybe.