Fresh Start

Just a spinning color wheel, then a blank screen.

I held the button down to restart. This isn’t supposed to happen to Macs. I’m used to the blue screen of death, but this machine is supposed to be foolproof, the shiny baby of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive. This isn’t supposed to happen. I hold the power button to restart.

A black screen, a gray question mark, and a link to support.

Fuck, no, no, no, fuck.

I was in the middle of writing something. A heartfelt post about dropping my youngest off at college. It wasn’t that heartfelt. It felt like a homework assignment, which is what it feels like to write. An endless stream of homework assignments. Writing is pain. And dealing with pain. And this was about my pain. And then the black screen.

I’m coming to terms with physical pain. As a runner, it’s currency. There is the normal pain of running which is why people hate it. There is the pain of overuse, and now the mental pain of slowing down, confronting the fact that soon it will be time to stop.

My Mac desktop was attended to by geniuses (genii?). They told me it was obsolete, and they weren’t allowed to fix it. They would barely look at it. Obsolete? I have friends who still breastfeed their children at the age of my broken-down, obsolete computer. I’m talking six or seven years old, and yes, I witnessed my friend’s daughter unbutton her mom’s shirt, undo her mom’s bra, and proceed to eat dinner in front of a group of guys who were discussing beer, probably.

They gave me the option of a new computer, but there was no way they could retrieve my data. They asked if I had been backing up to an external drive. They didn’t really ask, they just assumed I was doing that. Of course I was. That was what I told them. Oh good, the genii told me, then you can just buy one of these and transfer everything over. Sweet. My sarcasm is sometimes lost on the page, so if it wasn’t clear, I absolutely was not backing up to an external drive.

I don’t need the data. I have too much data. Thousands of old emails, years of accounting info from my company, poems half-finished, the first lines of stories, and the first chapter of multiple shitty novels, abandoned.

I feel lighter without it, and everything truly important is already in the clouds (I like that image better). The pictures and movies of the kids when they were young, just floating up there. That’s all I need.

Pictures of my youngest. Born too small, born way too soon, her small hands can’t even wrap around my finger. A video of her climbing rocks with me and saying you’ve got this with her small voice, before she learned to swear. Pictures of me reading her books before bed, videos of her singing along as I played guitar.

She hated the camera when she got older, during the high school years, which is funny because she sends thousands of snaps to friends. Every time I pointed the camera at her she would roll her eyes or give me a dirty look, and if she was in a good mood she would flash a quick, fake smile.

She dealt with skin issues through most of her life, first eczema that hurt her so bad she would cry, then acne that hurt her soul. I still wanted pictures of her. She is beautiful.

She has an old chromebook laptop in her room, and without a computer, I’ve been using hers. I could have moved it to my office, but I’m close to her here. At her desk surrounded by pink walls. Empty walls except for tape marks and nail holes where she stored her data.

She didn’t take much from home to decorate her new dorm room. I don’t know if she’s planning to stay there long, or if she just felt lighter without the memories. I painted something for her, and wrote a poem for her on the back. I’m not sure if she brought it to school.

I didn’t cry when we dropped her off. It’s surprising because I cry when a Taylor Swift song comes on, I cry at Lifetime movies, I cry when I watch my kids hug each other, I cry all the time, but I didn’t cry when I dropped my youngest off at college.

Someone asked me if I was okay dropping her off, and I said I wasn’t really sad, it was more of an emptiness, a depression. And that’s okay. I understand the need for a fresh start, a trail with no footprints. But I hope she took the card with her.

I hope she has those memories locked away, or in the cloud. The hikes, the runs, the trips to the beach, the soccer games, the track meets, the dinners, the early morning dance parties, the singing, all of it, I hope she can carry that with her because as tempting as it is to start clean, those important things stored in the cloud, those shaped her. The kids call it lore. And I like the idea of that. The lore that shapes us, that we can access occasionally when things are hard, when we are lonely, and when we miss our little girl more than she can imagine.

And thank God I took so many damn pictures.

She cried when we dropped her off. She doesn’t cry much, or at least in front of us. I can see her sweet face looking up, hands frantically waving at the tears, trying to save the eye makeup. I don’t have to worry about eye makeup, so I’m sitting in her empty room using her computer and there are some tears. I could say they are happy because she is off on her path, and that change is good, and this is a necessary and healthy step, but these tears, they are selfish, they are for me.