When I was little, I accidentally dropped a small, plastic dinosaur out the back window of my dad’s 1987 Ford Ranger.

I was five years old and had been pretending that the dinosaur was running quickly through the woods, holding him up against the open pop-out window as we sped through the Cascade Mountains. My sister and I had a lot of plastic dinosaurs back then, most of them too big to fall through the crack, but this guy was a tiny ankylosaurus made of soft glow-in-the dark plastic. My fingers twitched the wrong way and suddenly he was gone.

I was frozen. Should I alert my parents and ask them to turn around and search for him? Would they agree to that? Would we even be able to find him on the side of the highway in the heart of the Cascade Mountains? Would they be mad? Would my sister be mad when she found out?

I didn’t say anything, but I still think about this incident regularly. It was the first time I remember realizing that disaster can happen in an instant. One moment he was safe in my hand and the next moment he was gone forever.

Maybe it’s silly to assign such weight to that moment. “Accidentally dropped a beloved plastic dinosaur out the window of a car” is not on the childhood trauma questionnaire. But I was five; I loved my plastic dinosaurs and I had not yet experienced the finality of death, which is the real before-and-after moment in a person’s life.

Is that little plastic ankylosaurus still out there somewhere, sun-bleached and brittle from all those years on the side of the road? Is he destroyed or smushed? Did a stranger find him while cleaning the highway, and did this stranger pause and wonder how this little guy ended up out in the middle of nowhere before she thrust him into the trash bag?

I wish objects had the power to tell their stories.

And if my sister is reading this: I’m sorry I lost one of our plastic dinosaur friends 35 years ago!