Still More Loss

Scattered words and empty thoughts are what I have today. I learned yesterday that nearly all of my writings prior to this time last year were destroyed over the winter. Perhaps as many as twelve hundred pages of spiritual prose, journals, poetry, short stories, memoirs and letters - my emotional life laid bare - are now irretrievable gone.

The shock of this loss on top of everything that has beset me in the past few years is almost more than I can bear. Much of this loss chronicles my addiction and recovery, and my experience in the depths of mental illness as well as the process of therapy. My spiritual rants and ramblings not yet blogged, several hundred pages written in pencil during seven months of incarceration, seem to torture me least. Perhaps that is God's solace at work in my soul. But much of it was merely the inner machinations of a healing mind and spirit.

Several years ago a suffering alcoholic and friend took the pen I had used to write much of that material, a particularly fine Pelikan fountain pen, trading it for a bottle of vodka. Thinking the pen more important than the words, or that the pen's mysterious qualities brought the words out of me, I ceased to write for a period of time, until I had managed to forgive him. I would trade a hundred of those pens today to have half of those words back.