The scariest moment of my life...

The first emotion is absolute shock:

I'm sitting in my chair, just staring at the computer screen. My mouth moves, but no sound comes out... I must look like a beached fish, gasping for oxygen. That's pretty much what I feel like - it's hard to draw a breath and the air moves raggedly through my throat, rattling slightly.

Followed by furious, burning anger:

Just then, my brain seems to catch up with my body. My fists clench involuntarily, fingernails digging into palms, as my whole body stiffens. It's a reaction to the fire that was lit in my belly. A soft matchstrike at first that quickly - nearly instantly - builds into a raging inferno. The heat shoots up my chest and consumes my head as my face turns a brilliant shade of scarlet.

Gasp. I gulp in a lungful of air and a profanity explodes out with the exhalation. It doesn't give me any sort of release, so I try it again - louder and clearer, slamming both fists down into the arms of my chair. The exclamations and pounding come faster, in rhythm and the furniture in the room shakes. No one can hear me, it's nearly midnight, as I vent my frustrations to the air.

Which gives way to quiet, pleading denial:

I sink back into the chair and cease shouting. The sides of my hands are sore from slamming into the wooden arms, but I'm not thinking about that at all. Now, I'm once again looking at the computer screen. This time, shaking my head slightly and muttering, "No, no, NO," over and over again. I re-start everything, hoping that something's changed, like a desperate patient reviewing test results... but nothing has. The results are the same. The file is empty.

Last, a sickening realization:

I just deleted my entire music collection. Thousands of dollars and years of accumulation gone in an instant. 8,500 songs, 100 videos, 75 gigs of data... wiped out. I sold my CD collection last year and can't get the songs back. There is no backup. I am screwed.

*****

Friends, I hope and pray that this never, ever happens to you. Perhaps I am way to (psychotically) attached to my music collection, but I felt like a large piece of me died that night. This thing that had always been a part of me. Full of favorite albums, rare tracks, defunct local bands, Internet-only downloads and live cuts, I'd babied it over the years. Like a gardener, I pruned back albums that I no longer listened to, added new areas to appreciate, maintained it when it got old and upgraded to digital. More than mere enjoyment, my music collection was a hobby, no, a passion.

And then, in an instant, it was gone. I was alone. It was terrifying.

It all happened when I tried to re-partition my external hard drive so I could set up Time Machine to backup my data. If you're not tech-savvy, don't worry - I didn't understand half of what I just wrote.

Basically, I have an external hard drive to hold my music collection (it's too big to fit on my laptop). Time Machine is a Mac program that automatically backs up your computer. So, if you delete something by accident or if everything crashes, you can recover all of your files - not too shabby, eh? I wanted to use half of the external hard drive to house my music collection and half to back up my computer. To do so, I had to divide it (or "partition"), which is kind of like drawing a virtual line through the thing.

When I partitioned it, the program said that it would not touch any information stored in the current section of the drive, which is where I had all my music. It would just separate out a new chunk of space for me to use. Simple enough.

Except some glitch occurred - I don't know what - and my entire hard drive erased itself.

Poof. Everything was gone.

*****

Ultimately, acceptance:

It was gone. All gone. There was nothing more I could do.

My laptop's internal fan whirred to a stop, both silence and darkness filled the room as it turned itself off. Slowly, I picked myself up from my chair. Now past midnight, it was time for bed. 90 minutes of denial, frustration and vain attempts to turn back time had failed. I'd started trying to calculate the costs of rebuilding my music library... hours spent transferring files from friends' computers, re-buying albums that I couldn't live without... but it was overwhelming. I could never get it back.

I gave up and went to sleep, which came surprisingly fast. Perhaps I'd exhausted myself with worry.

"Tomorrow's another day," I thought, just before I drifted off.

A happy ending:

Brian, my brother and resident Apple-expert, sent me a link to Senuti. It's a progam that's intended to back up your iPod. You can use it to unlock any iPod and transfer the music files, playlists and videos back to your computer. It's free (donations encouraged) and works extremely fast...

A little ray of hope burst through my sickening cloud of despair. Maybe, just maybe, the program would work like advertised. I quickly downloaded it, opened it up and clicked the "transfer" button.

You could not imagine my joy when I saw names of songs flashing through the list, each one announcing a successful copy from the iPod back to my iTunes library! I shouted out of happiness, "Whoohoo!" Pumped my fists and ran around my room in circles.

Really.

I'm a child. And I turn 25 next week.

12 hours of depressing loss led to 3 hours of joyful exuberance as the program took 60 gigs of music and videos and restored them to all of their organized glory. In the end, I recovered all of my music and only lost about half of my videos (all from seasons of Lost and The Office).

I don't know what the lesson is here... I'm sure there's one somewhere. Frankly, I'm still too much in shock to figure it out. For a day, I ran the complete gamut of emotions - loss, depression, denial and anger to disbelieving happiness and celebration. I feel like it's the 2004 Sox-Yankees playoff series all over again.

I love life!