Hard Drive Goes the Hard Way

I heard the ominous whirring. The fan gunning and wheezing to a stop. But I ignored it and pressed onward. I could feel it dying every time I turned on the computer, its arduous start-up process. And it was made all the more pitiful by the broken hinges that meant I had to prop the lid on the couch arm to use it.

For Christmas, Mom gave me a ridiculously large external hard drive for backing up my photos. I left it in the packaging under the table by the bed until the night that the whirring turned to clicking.

Oh, the click of a withering hard drive.

I panicked, willing it to turn on just one more time. Just long enough for me to plug a USB in and drag all my precious files to safety. But instead, they drowned in a sea of rhythmic clicking. Like a life preserver tossed into a tempest, Mom (who's quite tech savvy) tried to reboot from the system disk. Alas, there was no hope. And so, I sat there on the couch, with my hand on the lid of the laptop and thought of all of the photos of Dillon and Reese and Wilmywood, all of the half-started stories and poems, all of the downloaded-only music, sinking down through the cyberspace abyss.

I carried it to the mall to a rather chaotic looking little shop where a harried Asian lady attempted to start the failed piece of crap. Instead of success, she shook her head sadly and repeated, "I don't know. It's the hard drive. I don't know." And I thought to myself, Don't say it again. And two weeks later, she declared it a lost cause.

I had flashbacks of the Sad Mac and poor Carrie Bradshaw's lost files. The Barrister guided me out of the mall while I alternately tried to console myself and contemplated quickly dispatching myself in front of a moving vehicle. I sat in the car, the hunk of plastic and circuits tucked inside the Belk bag that held my newly purchased "fat" shorts (adding insult to injury), and looked out the window. I felt stupid. Hard drive failure had happened to me at work. And I knew that the laptop was on its last leg. I remarked nearly every time I started it up that I needed to back it up. Instead, I let myself down.

Now, the hard drive is sitting on the dining room table, deftly removed from its casing by my mom. There's a box in one of the chairs. There's some packaging materials I've tossed on top for when I get ready to ship it to the ridiculously high-priced data recovery center. There's probably a thin film of dust on it - it's been weeks.

So why I haven't I sent it? I don't know. It's not that I don't want those memories back - I desperately want to be able to look again at the photos I took of Dillon at the playground the day before the hard drive died and the pictures I took at the work retreat and the autumn leaves at last year's trip to Valle Crucis and mine and The Barrister's Valentine's Day and, perhaps most desperately, the pictures I took of the Grace Street apartment that can never be replicated. I want the words I never finished, and the drafts of my thesis that lead me to what I published. And yet, if I don't send it, they are still alive, somewhere in cyberspace limbo. And if I do send it, I might have to hear that they're gone forever, little bytes of life vanished as though they never happened.