Looking back to the lost pieces

The other day I found a handful of old, published micro-fictions that I’d forgotten about, lying derelict in an eerie archive of lost sites and broken links. One of these, written seven years ago, was a micro-fiction on the normalisation of childhood Type II diabetes — NO BISCUITS.

I’d deleted the links, choosing to keep just a few recent stories on my profile, but  now I’m wondering why I got rid of so much of my work. It’s normal to present selected works rather than every last written thing, but we all have embryonic pieces — should we delete our own development or keep it as a marker of evolution? I don’t know. I enjoy creating stories, but I also love the feeling of purging things, the cleanliness of being cut free, and it’s often good to question whether something is worth continuing.

Today for the first time in ages, a story started to unfold in my head; a story that has never seen the light. Of course I didn’t have a pen or paper and I lost the words, they’ve gone and, once forgotten, words almost never come back. I’ve started carrying a notebook around with me.

My book, the thing I will not be talking about just because… well, it’s about loneliness. I’ve been listening to this:

 

We’ve all been there.