Wish I could take that one back

About 16 or 17 years ago, just after we were married, I was going through a bunch of papers and files that I had been moving with me from house to house during that transient period of life. We had just started grad school--K was in the PhD program at UMD, and I was in the architecture school. We were rollin' through the first year of school and marriage and everything was cool. I was sorting this paper, as I was in one of those "clear out the crap" moods that I find myself in when pigs happen to be flying. I came across a big file box full of letters and correspondence from friends through elementary school to the then present. I figured, I don't need this anymore. I'll just chuck it. So I did.

I wish I hadn't done that.

Here I am trying to maintain a log of my personal history for the latter half (hopefully longer) of my life, when in one fell swoop I trashed an enormous volume of correspondence that I will never recall. This provided a narrative framework for, at the time, about half of my life, since I wrote a ridiculous amount of letters to my friends, especially when I left my high school in the Philippines and finished my senior year at a brand new place here in Virginia. Some of my friends were great writers, too, and there's an honesty to the way they wrote that only lives on in my memories.

Too bad I didn't have a 2GB thumb drive back then.....