Do Not Speak of Casualties

April 17-18, 2009

When Hemingway’s wife lost all his writing he stayed, for a while anyway.  I couldn’t bear that.  When the fire happened and all was lost the only person to blame was someone I didn’t know.  There was no personal connection, no one I could look at daily and hate because they had killed the deepest thing in me—my writing.  This time my computer just crashed, but it is no one’s fault.  I feel bad for the poor mac guy, but I warned him I was going to cry.

I cannot recreate what is gone.  I can only mourn it.  Part of me is dead.  Yet again I encounter a grief that I do not have words for.  I encounter the death of something I loved.  I encounter what I believe to be a living hell.  Will what comes next be so good that it will justify the loss of the last year of work? How about the previous fifteen?

To think, it died as I was backing it up.  This is the cruelest and sickest part.  The part that makes my heart miss more beats than it already does.  This life of mine, it’s a tragedy.  All the tally marks say it’s true. Do I get something good soon?  Am I being set up or conspired against?  I write on paper and it burns.  I write on computer and it crashes.  Why do these bits of me keep evaporating into thin air?

It makes me afraid that I won’t ever be whole again.  Not when I know these pieces of me are lost forever.  Not when I feel like there is no hope of recovery. 

Despite the vivid dream I had last night, my book is still gone.  It has not magically reappeared on my new hard drive.  And despite the three year old tantrum, full of crying and “why is this happening to me! It’s not fair!” my computer is still only a shell of what it was.  It feels like an imposter. They even cleaned the screen.

I am in a state of hysterical denial.  I try to tell someone what happened and I just end in nervous laughter. I’m trying to embracing this place, be here in this moment and not anywhere else. But I just don’t what to be here.  I just don’t want to be in this place of constant sorrow.  The line that keeps running through my head is…

“Oh the pain of searing loss.”

So at what point does my mindset change and how?  I cannot convince myself that it didn’t happen, that it didn’t matter (and by “it” I mean many things.)  But I am a writer.  I know this much to be true and it is my worth right now.  I know my book is not dead, just taking another form.  Going in a different direction.  I wrote about a page today.  I’m not sure how much because I wrote on receipt paper while working and it’s in my pocket right now.  It’s good. It’s a new introduction.  An explanation of where I want the book to go, the impression I want it to leave.  If anything this has made me determined to study writing, maybe go somewhere with it.  However, I still don’t know what that will look like.

 

What will my life be made of?

 

Hemingway taught me never to speak of casualties.  But I’m a girl and I’ve lost everything more than once.  He was sure his early stuff wasn’t that good.  Neither was mine, except that this was not my early stuff.  This was my second round and maybe I am not as humble as him but, the second round was the best stuff I’d written.