One Two Five-O Let It Go

After much ado, I finally took approximately ten minutes on Saturday afternoon to pack up my hard drive. On Monday, The Barrister delivered it to the post office and sent it on its two-day priority way.

Today, I received the estimate - $1,250. One thousand, two hundred, fifty dollars. One-point-two-five-K. Twelve fifty (no decimal).

Now I know why I didn't send it. Something told me that it wouldn't be recovered so easily. That there would be a catch to the free evaluation and no-data-no-fee policy. That the fatal click was, in fact, fatal.

I called Mom, and then The Barrister. I choked up a bit talking to The Barrister. Partly over what I'd lost. And partly because I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I could've backed it up. That I knew it was dying. And yet, I didn't do anything.

I was talking to The Linguista about it later in the day.

"I'm sorry about your hard drive," she said. "Just think of it this way - you didn't lose your best writing because it's yet to come."

I half-smiled. "It's not the writing so much as the pictures."

"Of Dillon?"

"Yeah...of everything. Irreplaceable things. Wilmywood. But I've got no one to blame but myself."

"Well," she said. "I'm Buddhist, but you could always blame God."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah...or maybe just think of it this way. It's God's really cruel way of telling you to let it go."

I know she was kidding, but I still thought about the implications of it, were it true. The laptop was given to me as a graduation gift a summer early so that I could write my thesis on it. And I did. I wrote my thesis - the culmination of my need to "pursue the writing thing." I'm not saying that I'll never write, because I believe I will. I am saying there was a certain way of pursuing it that I exorcised myself of during grad school.

Then there was after grad school - a time of soul-searching. Of trying to find happiness that eluded me again and again. Of writing the same thing about myself and to myself over and over and over again in journal entries. I started the blog and stumbled my way through finding my way. I wound up back home, single, jobless, clueless. I found my job. I found The Barrister.

So perhaps The Linguista is onto something. Perhaps that this cataclysmic hard drive failure is more than motherboard deep. Perhaps it is time to let go of the memories I'm holding onto so tightly. Consign them to the cyber morgue - may they rest in peace - and let myself go in peace.