Creating from the Heart

About 12 years ago, two things happened. First, we had a flood. I had a pile of artwork I'd done in high school and college collected in one of those large reddish-brown paper portfolios. I'd only taken one art class in college, and while I could produce some nice things, it always took an enormous amount of effort and concentration. So each piece, for its own reason, was pretty dear to me. This folder got caught in that flood, and my dad--uncharacteristically--threw it away and everything inside it.

By the time I found out, it was too late and the news devastated me. That artwork had been things of the heart which I could never get back, never replicate.

A few months later, I had been working on the computer. When I was done, I took the 3.5 floppy out of the drive, gathered my things, and started up the stairs to bed. Three steps up, I tripped. Everything in my hands went flying, including a full glass of water. The floppy and the water made contact, and everything on that disk was destroyed.

On that disk were all the papers I'd ever written in college, and all the short stories I'd written up to that time (yes, most of all that paperwork were relatively short!). Naturally, I could not recover these things on the disk.

I told these two stories to a friend of mine shortly after the waterlogged-floppy incident. Henry said a bundle of his artwork had gotten destroyed in a flood, too, some years before. But it was his mother who had thrown the paintings away. He was livid, at first, but then realized everything he'd done was still in his heart. It was still recoverable from that hard drive of the soul, but it would come out in different form, sometimes even better than before.

I'm no longer friends with that person, but those words, so like the ones Ciel offered me in her comment, will always live in my heart. I don't do artwork anymore, but whenever I lose a document, or a chunk of text (which, thankfully, isn't often!), I always think of what my friend Henry said to me. Then, I hunker down and start over, having faith that the next result will be as good, if not better.

After I throw a hair-pulling, blood-curdling temper tantrum.