Incredible Loss

I am not one of those writers that have random ideas on sticky notes and cocktail napkins. I have a notebook and a laptop on which most of my writing goes. I upgraded laptops about a year ago and my friend offered to buy my older laptop to give to his sister, who was going off to college. I agreed and being the technological idiot that I am, asked him to copy all of my writing to a CD and just give it to me whenever he was done. He did just that and then erased everything from the computer. I took it for granted that my friend would find all my files. I popped in the CD one day to print off one of my poems. The disc took several minutes to load up and when I tried to access a specific file, I found I was unable. It seemed that all my writing was lost. I have always said that in a house fire I would go back in for my writing and nothing else. The Xbox could melt to a puddle of plastic, but if I lost my creative writing, I would be exceptionally upset. This corrupted CD had the same impact. I stopped writing knowing that some of my best (most recent) writing was lost. Some of the pieces that were lost were:
1. A love poem to a cigarette: Probably the funniest thing I have ever written.
2. Video Game poem: Another great performance piece that I use to read to the music of Mario Brothers.
3. Marriage Poems: I wrote a 5 part poem right after I got married that was about a guy who just got married and went from Love, to suicide, to divorce, and then back again over the course of his journey and in parts was very funny.
4. Two of the best performance pieces I have ever written that either having me sing or play the guitar (neither of which I do with a shred of talent so use your imagination).

I was devastated. I finally told my friend what he had done and to my surprise he told me that he had a copy of everything on his external hard drive. I was relieved and ecstatic. My livelihood was saved. I didn't bother getting the files for a couple of months because the knowledge that they were okay soothed my soul. I eventually got around to getting a new CD from my buddy and I immediately popped it into the computer to see if it would work. The CD worked fine and all files on the disc worked perfectly. The problem? He had not saved the majority of my writing because it was off in another folder that wasn't my primary documents folder. There were a couple pieces of writing and that was it. The majority of my work (even school essays were gone).
Now, a year later, I am finally starting to get back on my feet with my writing. There is no way that I will be able to remember the poems that I have lost; my inspiration just doesn't work like that. The way good ideas come to me is fast and fleeting. If I don't take advantage of a bolt of inspiration, it is quickly gone, never to be found again. (I always keep a notebook with me for that reason)
I was reminded of this because in my attempt to find something to submit for today's post, I found the two performance pieces that I thought were lost forever. I found them in an old notebook. I was so happy to find them, but even writing this now, I feel a weight on my heart about losing those great poems. It may seem silly to feel that way about some random piece of writing, but to me it feels like losing so much more. (I didn't mourn this much when my grandmother died)
I am trying to figure out how to post audio clips on the blog, but I should have a performance posted in the next couple of days.