The thing I most regret losing are three notebooks of things I wrote during about this period of time. It was a record of my madness — my written proof that I had survived something, something big, which had altered me to the point where you wouldn't have recognized me then if you saw me now. I have written about these and about losing things before (which is why this is a redux). Like I have said, my mom threw them out, probably because it hurt and/or disturbed her to see those things. I guess I have yet to let go of them, those scribblings that I will never see again. You see, why they mean so much to me still is that those notebooks at the time of my writing in them gave me meaning, my reason for existing. My voice, the thing where I spoke, "I'm alive. I am." Perhaps I will never let go of them, that my memory of them will only magnify my sense of loss.
It is a mystery why some things happen, mysteries of which perhaps we may never know the reason. Is it wise for me not to let go of these lost things, which meant so very much to me, whose value I will perhaps miss for the rest of my days? It is little solace to think of such things, "It was meant to be." That it is true makes us not feel the one jot better. But it is easy to be bitter, never move on, always to live in the past that could have been. I once cut out the word "Courage" written in Old English script and stuck it in a Bible where I had highlighted the words, "God is love." I imagined me or someone, in desperation, would open that Bible and find that bookmark, the instructions: "Courage: God is love." It is perhaps a test of faith, these dear things we lose, a hope that these things that go awry have a deeper meaning than we can see, that there is a plan to the whole works, after all.
Tatiana