The rain has washed away where my shoes have been

and it does matter. It does. This is not liberating, not at all. I knew I should have gotten that Glow-in-the-Dark Plastic Angel at the nields concert, and I could have put it on my computer, and it wouldn't have crashed. It crashed because I didn't buy that angel even though deep down I knew I needed it. The loss is not as bad as it could have been. Most of the fiction I have in some unedited form somewhere else. THe academic essays are gone. A lot of the essays from Nonfiction class at GS are gone, although if I looked hard enough I might could find early hard copies in my files at home. Most of the poetry was shitty anyway so i don't really care if it got eaten up by cyber space. But there are letters, drafts of emails that were difficult to write. I started a sequence of letters to my daughter when I was 15 where I told her about how it felt to be a teenager, how it felt to be insecure, how it felt to love so much it hurt, how it felt to hurt someone, how it felt to be free. These were the most honest things I had ever put down on paper, so honest that I was afraid to print them out. Maybe I'll never have a daughter, and so it won't be such a loss. And there are other things, self indulgent fiction that I can scarcely mention on this blog much less ever save or print out, things that I worked on with more pleasure than my more serious pieces, silly things with no literary merit, novels that I began when I was 14 where everyone eventually finds true happiness, so much of my fantasy world that is harnessed in my real fiction. I have old drafts on some of these, but a draft is not anything like what it becomes when you've worked on in word by word for years.
So what is to be done? There is still hope, I suppose. I've contacted some computer people. Maybe they can salvage my C-drive or at least the my documents folder. But maybe they can't and I just have to pick myself up off the floor and move on. And maybe it won't matter five years down the line what was lost. Maybe when i start from the drafts it will be ten times better on the second try. But it matters now. And I've gone to my computer several times today and tried again, hoping that maybe the results will be different, and they never are and I just end up crying in frustration. If they somehow manage to save my files then I can get closure and just throw the damn thing against a brick wall and smash it with a sledge hammer...nothing would give me more pleasure, but if it they can't, then those files will just be stuck there, and I'll never be able to take my mind off it. I'll be able to look at my computer and say, there they are, and it will be so frustrating to not be able to reach them.