RIP to the Art in Me

Tonight I laid to rest hundreds of pieces of who I am when a malicious virus completely obliterated my computer's hard drive. I was perusing a favorite blog that has never given me any trouble over the years, and suddenly I was watching my desktop icons flicker out one by one like stars in an apocalyptic sky. I immediately ran MalwareBytes, my malware protection software. To my horror, I was forced to watch as it, too, was consumed by the virus.

The virus restarted my computer, and I logged back in to a black screen with nothing but the date and time in one corner and the start menu in the other. When I clicked the start menu, there was nothing there.

No documents, pictures, program files--nothing. Slowly the shock wore off and the reality of the fact that seven years worth of my creative life had just been snuffed out as though they never happened began to sink in. Every poem, story, article, play, and book that I had ever written--every piece of digital art that I had every created--they had all been destroyed.

I started to cry, and when Josh found out what had happened, he cried, too. I asked him what was wrong and this was his precious response about the loss of all of my works,

"Those pieces were pieces of you. I feel like someone I love just died."

That about sums up how I feel write now. In the recent aftermath of this disaster, a friend asked me if I was okay, but then realized that this was a rhetorical question. I'm not okay. I'm devastated.

I'm wavering between scrambling to find CDs, thumb drives, and hard copies of some of my data in order that I might save a few scant pieces . . . and just slowly laying to rest all of these hundreds of works of art that I have loved for so long.

This picture from my senior year of high school is the first I ever took on my laptop's webcam. I never thought I'd miss those dim, grainy shots.

Goodbye, Dell Inspiron 1520 and all that your death took with you.