A Life in Words

Recently, my good friend James had the misfortune of having his entire online archive erased. Gone are the gazillion inventive passages he'd constructed over two years' time, the emotional depth unmatched by most blogs I read (including my own, in which I struggle to keep my deepest emotions in check for reasons I'm not certain are valid).

James insists he is not angry or upset over losing volumes of work, instead seeing it as an opportunity to start clean. A fresh palette, he calls it.

The episode made me think about how I'd handle losing my own written works. Since the crash of my overly-expensive lemon of a Dell laptop five years ago, during which I lost several significant pieces I'd foolishly saved only to my hard drive, I've become obsessed with saving shit. I've done away with floppies, having graduated to Flash Drive memory stick thingies that are small and cute and hold lots of crap with minimal effort on the part of technologically-challenged folks such as myself.

My life is about paper. My most important personal belongings are of the paper variety: letters, cards, photos, books. My archive of letters and cards from friends, lovers and family fills several galvanized steel boxes. My obsessive practice of printing out especially sweet, loving or othwerise emotionally-charged emails has perpetuated the need for a gaggle of three-ring binders, in which select emails now live out their days, affectionately perused along with scores of handwritten letters on those occasions when nostalgic longing trumps whatever more practical uses I can make of an afternoon.

Newspapers and magazines covering significant events in history (and my own life) are lovingly saved in my old steamer trunk, yellowing gradually over the years and fraying more at the edges with every move I make. Yearbooks and various high school clippings fill an entire box, while letters and cards fill three. I could pay off my undergraduate loans with the money I'd make selling back to Hallmark the hundreds of cherished greeting cards I have kept over the years. Photos fill countless albums, with extra prints and carefully preserved negatives stored in yet more boxes.

Then there are my own personal notebooks: cheap spirals filled with years of emotional, soul-searching journal entries, short stories, poems, ideas. Years worth of the remnants of my imagination, spilled out in ever-changing penmanship into various notebooks and carefully-chosen hardbound journals purchased when I convinced myself I'd write more if I only had prettier paper on which to create.

Paper, in its various forms, is my most cherished possession. Words are my most important, most tangible memory of nearly every significant moment in my life. I dream in words. I earn my living as a writer. My whole life is words. I have no jewelry, furniture, knick-knacks or other material items worth saving were my home to go up in flames. Just paper. And while my blog is not paper, per se, it most definitely belongs in that category. Even with its often incoherent ramblings and silly throwaway entries, it is a record of my life.

Posted by ayelet at September 22, 2004 11:59 AM