Lost Words

Sometimes, I think about all the stuff I’ve written that’s lost to the ether.  

Last week, I thought of a short story I’d written for the Tulsa Library Adult Fiction contest way back in 1999 called No Kisses for Darla. It was about a bartender with a cursed ankh necklace. I threw it together in a couple of days, entered it, warts and all, and got what amounted to third place out of 100+ entries.  

It was my first fiction submission ever. 

It would take another 18 years before I’d try again. 

I didn’t get to attend the awards ceremony because I had to go to a wedding in Vegas, but they assured me it would be bound with the other winners and set upon the shelf in the Tulsa Central library. I always assumed I’d get by there and check it out, but I didn’t. 

Over the years, media storage has changed. I’m pretty sure I had the original stored on a Zipp disk, but the disk is gone.  

Last week, I tried to find out if the story was still in the library. I’d like to have a copy, after all. As it turns out, it likely isn’t. They only keep those a couple of years.  

So that story is lost. I remember being kind of proud of it. I had a lot of match cuts between scenes, and played with two concurrent (past/present) narratives. Alas. 

And then there are my movie review columns. Eleven years at 1500-2000 words a week, times 50 weeks per year equates to somewhere between 825,000 and a million words. I probably have saved maybe 20 columns in my cloud. I didn’t keep clips (back in the day when you cut your stories out of the newspapers or magazines with scissors and kept them in a fancy manila folder in a cheap metal file cabinet).  

All those words, lost. 

Some of them were even good, too.  

I am somewhat lackadaisical about bylines. Had a few, am not personally impressed by having done so. 

Still, it does sorta bother me that they’re gone. Urban Tulsa went out of business, its website shuttered alongside it. We tried to save the archives, but couldn’t come up with the funds.  

All those lost words, all that lost work. 

When I’m dead and gone, all that remains of me will be the words I’ve committed to “paper” and to the hearts and minds of those left behind. Maybe I should’ve taken more care to preserve those things, maybe it’s a more realistic view of our place in history. Fleeting. Dismissed.  

I would’ve liked to have read that story again.