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A post-modern tale of loss By
Alisha Geary It was very late and I was tired but my mind was going a million miles an hour. I knew I was grieving. Was this worth grief? I had cheerfully sat at my computer, the red disk went in the slot, my computer made a happy buzzing noise. Then an angry sign appeared: Access Denied, A:/ drive inaccessible. Windows continued popping up, each denied me that which I longed for. A whole year's work: my thoughts, my dreams, my masterpieces, my homework, the miraculous and the mundane, two scholarship essays, a resume, a thesis, and the blasted Tinnemyer paper. Fear gripped my stomach and painful gasps wheezed out of my chest. "It has to be there, please." The thought beat at my eardrum and clenched my heart, restricting my lungs. I had just been diagnosed with asthma, but the inability to breathe had not become commonplace yet. I couldn't breathe and I had lost a year of my life. I sought to reclaim everything and I was harshly denied. Paranoia set in. I found every disk I had ever owned, then every hard copy of anything I had ever written. Pages and pages were missing, lost, trapped on that recalcitrant disk. Trapped. I fell to my knees and sobbed out, "What do I do? Start over?" The sobs broke my chest, but I was too angry to cry. I began to go through boxes, finding old papers: half a dissertation, an acceptance speech I wrote in tenth grade for the Pulitzer Prize. I was supposed to have won it by now. All that work gone. How could I get it back? It was the darkest part of the night. I retyped a proposal and my journalism article. How would I come up with a twenty page poetry response by the next Tuesday. What about the rewrite paper? I looked to my notebook for solace. All I knew was that I was crushed, broken, and grieving. My writing became a variation on the theme of "How can I reclaim all I have lost?" There was no answer and none has come since. Technology, beautiful technology, my friend, suddenly had turned its gigabytes against me. One whole year of work. Like so many other things, rebuilding will never make it be the same. No amount of retyping will bring back my 40 finished poems. No amount of rebuilding will bring back the Trade Towers or the people who died in them. These thoughts whirled in my mind as I sought the comfort of my bed. It would never be the same again.
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