rollarcoaster

I rode a roller-coaster yesterday.  Of the emotional kind.

Horrible.

The computer has been running so slow.  Freezing, and sluggish.  I know what the problem is.  Too much stuff.  And as I have been shedding stuff lately – going through cupboards, piles, stashes, detritus it seemed the right time to address lady mac as well.

So the portable hard drive bought months ago was brought out finally, and the photos were transferred onto it.

When I say the photos I mean all the photos.  9,147 of them.

Yep – you don’t have to say it.

Anyway, the photos were transferred over – slow, slow, slow process.  Checked they were where they should be.  And then the plunge was taken to move all the ones from the mac hard drive into the trash. Check that they are still on the portable drive? yes.  good.  Ok.  Empty trash.  OK!  watch them vanish.  o items.  feeling kind of excited and nervous.  still on the portable drive?  yes.  good.

Wake up the next day to start sorting them into groups.

They are gone.

Family photos, baby photos, get togethers, paintings, holidays, rocks and assorted weird stuff that appeals to me.  reference photos for future works. Time recorded for posterity gone.

I can’t tell you how quickly I collapsed into a sobbing heap when the realisation hit me.  I can’t imagine how it must feel for someone to lose their house and everything in it – let alone loved ones in a fire.  Nothing had changed.  everything had changed.  I couldn’t even find the words to explain to my family what had happened.

The photos were found.  it seems the hard drive is a slow and unresponsive beast that likes to take its time before nodding to the outside world.  Something like an hour later they all just popped up like nothing had happened.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach and won tattslotto all at once.

And I have discovered that the sluggish portable drive won’t let me do anything in a hurry which means sorting and organising the photos on it is kind of impossible.  I will probably have to transfer them back onto my hard drive and then move them back again which given recent experience makes me feel sick.

They are only photos.  They are meaningless most of them to anyone but me, but they represent years of looking through the lens and not participating fully in the moment – which was the sobering realisation.

Perhaps what was shed was more than detritus.  I feel my eyes have been opened.