RIP, My Beloved HP!

I am devastated. I am so sorry to say that my beloved HP laptop, after 4 years of excellent service to me, has met its demise. And oh dear reader, the loss!

I feel like I've lost a limb. A phantom pain. So I thought I'd write about it - to offload my grief, to give you all a heads-up on my maybe future absence and to pen an honourable epitaph to my trusted writing machine for so long.

I enjoyed such a special relationship with my HP. It was my trusted steed that carried me into word battle, not just my writing instrument, but my writing incentive. How it would assent to my every demanding whim and finger tapping frenzy without freezing, without complaint, without malfunctioning. It was one of the sole things in my life that could live up to my fast-paced synapse-firing thinking. (I am currently using my sister's laptop, an obstinate Dell - how many times it has tested my patience - and although I am thankful, it will never compare to my beloved neat and nimble and speedy and extraordinarily efficient HP.

My HP was conducive to sporadic writing fits. Its keys were soft and responsive to fast typing (whereas these keys are heavy and cumbersome and not made to glide with the speed of a writer's words!) Oh how I long for its black keys, finger smudged lighter in the middle from use. I love the sound they'd make as they tapped frantically along to the sparking of thoughts. God I miss it!

And I've been so less prolific now because of the loss of not just my writing medium, but all my files, that have been banished to hardrive limbo until I invest in another new laptop. (No I didn't back-up - the pain!)  And how to do that exactly? Where would I start? Losing a laptop is like losing a pet. How can they be replaced?

I feel so lost without it. So cut off. Feel like I'm floating along in limbo ever since. My laptop connected me to my power source: my writing. Sure, I scribble in notebooks, random pieces of paper whenever inspiration strikes, but it's NOT THE SAME. For me, computer script has always been synonymous with a  finished written product, the professional draft, not the pencilled one. The ease of editing and pasting and chopping lines can never be equalled with pen and paper.

I know most writers would profess their love of the quill and paper method, the alchemy of ink transforming a blank page, but I don't! I need my computer to do that for me! Pen and paper just screams amateur, reminiscent to me of diary scribblings, doodles, and worse -feather-light ramblings that will never be committed to digital permanence and weight, ideas, in their most infant stage, with no hope of growing into fully-fledged scripted pages.

Oh the ache of it! To be disconnected from all my years of wordship is hard to take. I feel so wordless - the intellectual equivalent of legless I'm sure.  And to be writing on another person's computer doesn't feel right. I can't find my groove. Can't navigate through this model's slow and bedamned programs compared to my own! (By the way, any Dell owners ever experience random demonic cursor leaps?? I'm typing along and suddenly I'm three lines above typing----- malforming a perfect sentence into gibberish. It's out to get me, it really is. I feel my nerves fraying every moment I'm on it - THEE most annoying thing a writer could experience while in writing mode, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

So I'm going to have to sign off and maybe not write again until I can find a suitable replacement. Every day without my familiar blue screen and hundreds of Word files of thoughts at the click of a very compliant mouse is one in which I feel blanker and blanker. Can words really affect us so much? Yes! I'm sure if you emptied out my insides you'd find Garamond fonted words, entrails made of sentences and ink where there should be blood.

And my poor desolate HP now lies with its heart (hardrive) removed, a big blank black silence. I am sorry to think I will never see its blue light power up again or hear its welcoming start-up ping or  be comforted by its blue-sky Word backdrop or feel its heavy weight on my lap or comfortingly smudged keys fit snugly beneath my fingers.

Nope.

If you don't see any posts from me in the next while, know dear readers, that I am in mourning for a dear friend. A medium and a mentor. Know that somewhere out there, in the non-digital universe, I am surely scribbling, but only on paper. Until that opportune time, when I meet the next ideal HP and take to the neon lights of Word again.

Laptopless and lost-in-limbo -

~ Siobhán.