I fired up my old computer for the first time in months. I’ve been using my work computer at home most of the time – a practice I usually avoid. Since I’d be turning my work computer in at the end of the week, I needed to test the old laptop to see if it still worked. It does. After starting it up, I began to go through some of the files. Since I’m cleaning out my physical life for the move, I thought I could spend a little time looking at my digital life. I found a folder of cat pics…. A lot of cat pics. In there, I viewed the pics of Murphy – that sweet bully of a tuxedo who we had for far too short a time. He loved to sleep legs sprawled out with his belly exposed – the perfect trap for a human hand.
I found a folder of pictures of a woman, D, who I dated for a while. I was tempted to reach out to her, ask how things are going, see if she’s gotten engaged yet. I won’t. There was an entire folder of monkey pictures.
I was dating a woman, K – with the Tesla. She was having a bad day and I asked if monkey pictures would make her smile – she didn’t believe that I would flood our text conversation with monkey pics – it made her smile. I found pictures of hikes and trips. Pictures of my stepdaughter Carolyn, and my ex-wife.
Of course there were other things… a dozen versions of the budget spreadsheet that I keep. Just as many versions of the password spreadsheet I keep. Tax documents. A folder of art pics that I used to like. Some poems I had written. And an export of 10 months worth of texts with my ex-fiancee, B.
I remember reading the texts, all of them, start to finish (twice) when B first left. I was looking for any clue on what happened. Looking for clues on where things went wrong – could I pinpoint a moment. I found a doc that had snippets of those texts that were good examples of how she often took things I said the wrong way, or assumed I was upset with her when I wasn’t… I had also set aside a bunch of texts that showed how much she disliked her work. In the end, she blamed me for making her leave her job, but within the first few weeks of starting the job she was talking about leaving (way before I ever started wanting her to leave the job that made her miserable on a daily basis).
(holding that thought – going out to hear a band)