Permanent Loss

I am in mourning. You'll think it is stupid, but I don't care. You'd think I'd learn from my past. It wasn't the first time I'd been so stupid. I cried. It was stupid. It was unique. It was ultimate.

When I was in college 6 years ago, I was reading Oscar Wilde and I brought it out to BC to visit my friend Dan. We drank heavily that night and needed something to mix with vodka, so I went and bought a cheap gallon of orange juice. The morning after I took it with me and threw it in my bag so as not to waste it. It popped open and poured a half gallon of orange juice out over everything in my bag. Oscar Wilde was ruined. I never even got a replacement until someone bought me one six months ago after I told them the story. I never thought I'd do the same thing again six months later with something much more dear to me than Oscar Wilde.

I write. When I say that, I mean it in two ways. I write for a living and I also hand write everything. I type what I write in my notebook afterward. In the last week, I wrote two amazing scenes for my novel. They were dramatic and poignant and riveting. I had not had the chance to transpose them into my computer yet. My friends and I planned an excursion last Saturday and alcohol was involved so I put a bottle of Jameson whiskey in my bag. It leaked last night and destroyed my notebook. It is soaked entirely through and half of each page is a blue ball of blurred nothingness. I lost the two scenes.

It is unique because it is ultimately gone: the words I wrote, the language I weaved, the scene I created. They are gone and never to be duplicated or retrieved. It is like the death of a human being. I have never had a child and I have never created something such as this that I have loved like a child. Its death hit me sideways. I will write the scenes over again. The content will be the same. My memory is good enough that it will hold the spirit of the scenes I already wrote. But it will not be the same. The problem with this is that I almost feel like it is a perversion of the memory of the words that were destroyed by breathing new life into a replacement.