Voenix Rising

It’s been nine months since the fire, and still—every now and then—I’m unexpectedly hit with an overwhelming sense of loss. Yes, I know we all got out safely and probably 85% of our things were salvaged or replaced with new, but occasionally I’m caught unawares by the thought of something in that other 15% and it just devastates me.

Case in point, this morning I was listening to my “Winter 2016” music mix (prompted by a friend to whom I’d sent it on CD back in the day asking for a new track list last week), and seeing there were several soundtrack cuts in the mix, I remembered that my hasty decision to just let all my DVDs get crated off to the dump in the aftermath of the fire was a horrible, horrible mistake. There were several in the collection that I wished I’d kept; notably gifts from Ben: Westworld,  Preacher, and lord knows how many others. Then there were all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the short-lived Caprica series, a copy of The Martian that we bought on a whim and brought home for a date night, and dozens of others that are now just gone. Blame for losing them lays squarely on my shoulders, even though at the time I didn’t deem them important enough to keep.

And then there was the box of CDs in my den closet, something that I would have rescued if I’d remembered they were there. I hadn’t played any of them in years, having digitized everything, but many of them had extreme sentimental value. Some I’d owned for thirty or more years and were part of the “don’t sell no matter how dire your financial situation becomes” collection. All gone; realized only after the salvage company had gone through the place and they were not on the “salvage and restore” list—or, frankly, the disposal list either. So god only knows what happened to them.

So I’m in a bit of a funk today.