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May 16, 2005
Delayed Reaction
The weekend passed in a blur, but it was a good blur, as opposed to a bad one. I abstained and refrained. I felt much better, but a somewhat foolish decision made on (a whim) Saturday had me facing up to all the consequences.
I realized that one can stop feeling for something which you have suffered losing it once before. No matter what happens, no matter how big it is, once you are done with all that mourning, life goes on inevitably. Where there was once a saddening abyss which threatened to tear one apart, there remained a vacuum at the end of it. The emptiness can be strange but through time you can live with it.
Hard disks are such fragile things. I suffered the pain once of having all my precious photos from Cambodia disappear due to a crash. It was agonizing to say the least, because I promised my faithful moto guide that I would send him photos we took together to him at Siem Reap. I felt particularly bad because the pictures were gone and I was unable to keep to my end of my promise. Moreover, some of them contained photos of his immediate family whom he had not seen for years. I never realized the power of photography and no matter how badly the photo was taken, it could well be a priceless one that could be the defining thing of someone’s posterity, or even reason to live.
Then, there are words.
Until a month ago, all that stuff I wrote since 2001, were kept nicely in my hard disk. The file size was huge, more so when it had a “txt” as its extension. It contained the best and the worst of my life’s writing. It found its place in that particular hard disk when AOT was taken down. It was not as though I intended to keep it for posterity sake. Just that storing the fruit of something I enjoyed doing somewhere gave me some semblance of peace, perhaps.
The disk crashed and all was gone.
Without having suffered the loss of the Cambodia photos, this would have left me devastated. Yet, strangely there was no mourning over the loss. Life went on as normal. Or perhaps, so many things have happened in such a short span of time that the system could no longer push out an overwhelming emotion to eclipse all others.
Or is it true that as one grows older, you feel less emotional to things around you?
What is sadder is that I feel no longer able to recreate the highs of my writings during the 2001 to 2002 period. Not that I write like some genius or talent, but it is still a loss.
Maybe the loss still has not dawned on me.
Posted by D W at May 16, 2005 11:34 AM