There are so very many steps involved in writing a book. I planned to begin work on Step One today: making a time-line. Not exactly an outline, just a basic list of events and dates.
I went through my stash of letters on Friday afternoon, looking for anything relevent. I've saved most of the letters I've ever received in a huge plastic storage box. Literally, I still have the very first letter I EVER received: a rejection letter from "Highlights for Children" telling me that they liked my story, but that they just couldn't fit in everybody's submissions. I've saved pretty much everything else, too.
Except I couldn't find the letters I was looking for. The correspondences between myself and this girl named Sandra whom I met in Ithaca. There were only four letters left out of probably thirty or so. The missing ones, I can only guess, were lost during my last move.
I cannot tell you how vital those letters were. I just needed a date off of ONE of them. ONE date. I've saved so many hundreds of letters, and the ONE I was looking for is evidently gone forever.
I re-read a few dozen letters from Jayden. Some of them were relevent to my task, others weren't. Some of them said things like: "...that's so neat what you told me about those kids... Your last letter was SO fascinating..." If ONLY I'd saved copies of the letters I sent Jayden instead of just saving the replies. At this point, I can't even write to Jayden and ask her for them back. I can't even ask to borrow them. I can't even offer to pay her to ship them to me. Jayden's house burned down in 1997 or 1998, and I can only assume that most of my letters to her (which she lovingly saved; gahd bless that girl!) were lost. Everything else was, I know.
These things were SO precious... These were my only real records of nearly a year of my life. Oh, I still have the blue journal I'd been keeping then, but the entries are vague, dry, bland... I carried the damn thing with me EVERYWHERE; I couldn't bear the thought of somebody else reading the really intimate stuff, so I saved that for letters to people whom I trusted. I'd still trust Jayden with my life -- gahd knows it wasn't HER fault her house burned down. And it isn't Sandra's fault we lost touch.
Nearly a year of my life is gone, and I'm going to have to piece it back together with guesswork and those vague references in the stupid blue journal. I cannot believe I have to start this project from scratch. You cannot know how disheartening this is... It won't be an IMPOSSIBLE task, but it will lose some of its accuracy.
Why didn't I protect these words better? The events of this time period, from May of 1997 until February or March of 1998, are gone. The ONLY way to get them back is by exercising my memory. If ONLY I had saved all the stupid scraps, the letters, the scribblings, the rantings. If ONLY I had copied things before I sent them out. If ONLY I'd dated things better, organized things...
I feel like crying.
I have eighty-eight dollars in my pocket right now, a result of dog-sitting for the weekend and selling my stereo. Eighty-eight dollars. Almost half my rent. But I'd drop every cent of that money if I could just have those precious letters back. I'd find some magical way of quadrupling that eighty-eight dollars if it would get me my letters back.
How can you possibly understand the VALUE of these things? They're just priceless, just completely irreplaceable.
A rather desperate and pointless plea: if you have ANY letters I wrote to you from May of 1997 until February of 1998, PLEASE contact me. I don't think there are any of you who would have any of them, and I'm sure nobody who reads this would be in possession of any relevent ones, but it's just SO important... I just don't know what else to do...
~Helena*