023

Have you ever written five pages of something that you really admire—something that has been nagging at your mind for years in the making—only to have it deleted in the blink of an eye?  It takes something like flying for an hour from Atlanta to Sarasota for your computer to go haywire and begin backspacing your entire document.  You tell yourself, “Oh, it’s ok.  It did this early.  I’ll just exit and it will open from where I last saved.”  But it doesn’t.  You restart your computer and open Microsoft Word, and the recovery file shows up, timestamped just seconds before your computer crashed.  You double-click, praying for a miracle, but no words appear.  Thousands of words that you have spent hours planning and typing are erased from existence.  You want to scream and curse and cry all at once because it basically turns out to be a big waste of time, because, really, who wants to read your writing anyway?  It’s a waste of time.  No one makes money from their Bachelor’s in English.  Maybe this is a sign from God that you need to think realistically, that you should have majored in Math and Sciences because those are concrete and unchanging.   

So, now you’re screwed.  And this little girl sitting next to you on the plane has no idea that you feel like a piece of your soul was just robbed from you; because, let’s face it, your writing is a piece of you.  That’s what you started writing, because it’s all you know how to do.

So, you smile at her, because she’s too young to know that life doesn’t always turn out the way you had planned it.  Sometimes the world just fucks you over.