"A little piece of paper with a picture drawn
Floats on down the street till the wind is gone
The memory now is like the picture was then
When the paper's crumpled up it can't be perfect again"
[Linkin Park, "Forgotten"]

I'm home from work today, feeling quite ill. In order to keep from going insane, I decided I'd stay occupied by sorting through all my old software. I plan to do the same all my old computer parts soon too, as part of a major purge of old junk. In going through all the old CDs, I came across a few things I really hadn't expected, as I had old CDs where I'd backed up old document and picture folders from previous times and computers.

It wasn't a horrible emotional experience or anything like that, don't get me wrong. It was quite the contrary really. My alarm is, in a way, at how little I cared at seeing certain old photos and writings to/from/about old girlfriends. I was a little taken back by how there are these entire periods of my life that have practically disappeared from my mind. I guess I'm better at putting the past in the past than I thought. I'm not completely "pure", and I can admit that. There exists still the slightest taint of the past that sometimes lingers in the back of my mind, but which I'll not bother to expose to the light here. But for the most part, what's done is done and gone, and long gone in most cases.

In a roundabout way, I think that actually says something very positive about my current situation. Obviously, while I've learned from the experience of the past, my focus these days is so strongly rooted in the present and future, my mind no longer wanders back to regurgitate and ruminate the unresolved.

More interesting, however, is something I discovered about this journal, which is what really brings me here today. I discovered four entries that were never published. One was one written and not published at the time to spare some feelings, and I think is best left that way. The other three were written before February 2003, but using this very same format, which poses a mystery to me. One is very personal and directed to someone, but two are just very run-of-the-mill entries, so there's no apparent reason I wouldn't have published them, yet they pre-date the earliest stuff here by a few months. This begs the question as to whether I've lost a bunch of earlier entries. Oddly, I've found no others, nor any record of any others, nor, for that matter, any record of a framework going back those extra few months. Could it be I wrote 3 entries while planning the site, and that they never actually made it up here when I finally went forward?

Bizarre. For now, I'll leave them be. Maybe they just weren't meant to be here.