What Was Lost
All my stories, for one thing. Oh, I know, I have some backups here and there. But I was living primarily on my laptop for the last three months. And for the last six of those, all my backups were in my flash drive-- which was also in the laptop bag.
There were also work files from my previous jobs, music files, pictures, lists, notes, this-and-that-- really, my whole life for three months were in that laptop. It's hard to characterize the loss itself: one can give a price tag for the actual item stolen but how do you give value to what you've created? You can try to re-create them again but that initial spark, that fire that set the idea burning and blossoming into a possible story-- all of the bits and pieces that held those sparks were lost.
Sometimes I feel like I'm haunted: I would remember something and then stop and say, "Ah, that was also what was lost." But as a good friend says, what can we do? We live in an unfair and unjust world. There is no such thing as magic in the real world, except in what we create and pour into it.
Maybe this should teach me to rely too much on the wonders of technology. Maybe this is a kind of a virtual clean slate, a very expensive crumpling-of-paper-and-throwing-it-into-the wastebasket way of doing your stories right. A kind of starting all over again. We reach for any kind of reason when reason is not enough, after all.
At the end, I reached finally for humor: last Sunday while we were driving home, I started singing Air Supply's All Out of Love to the consternation of [identity-protected]. I had no reason why and I didn't really care to explain. I just felt like doing it.
When in doubt about life, reach for absurdity...
There were also work files from my previous jobs, music files, pictures, lists, notes, this-and-that-- really, my whole life for three months were in that laptop. It's hard to characterize the loss itself: one can give a price tag for the actual item stolen but how do you give value to what you've created? You can try to re-create them again but that initial spark, that fire that set the idea burning and blossoming into a possible story-- all of the bits and pieces that held those sparks were lost.
Sometimes I feel like I'm haunted: I would remember something and then stop and say, "Ah, that was also what was lost." But as a good friend says, what can we do? We live in an unfair and unjust world. There is no such thing as magic in the real world, except in what we create and pour into it.
Maybe this should teach me to rely too much on the wonders of technology. Maybe this is a kind of a virtual clean slate, a very expensive crumpling-of-paper-and-throwing-it-into-the wastebasket way of doing your stories right. A kind of starting all over again. We reach for any kind of reason when reason is not enough, after all.
At the end, I reached finally for humor: last Sunday while we were driving home, I started singing Air Supply's All Out of Love to the consternation of [identity-protected]. I had no reason why and I didn't really care to explain. I just felt like doing it.
When in doubt about life, reach for absurdity...
