I'm not a sentimental person. Receiving gifts is my primary love language. So I'm not talking about gifts or even cards I have received. I keep all those. I even put cards on my board in the craft room. When I say I'm not sentimental, I mean I don't keep trinkets or ticket stubs or miscellaneous items to remind me of special times.
The only sentimental thing I hang onto are roses. I have a glass container where I keep one rose or rose petals from each time my husband has given me roses in the past 20 years. That's it though. You won't find shadow boxes or smash books in my house.
I didn't realize until today (Monday), that I was hanging on to something else of sentimental value. For the past few months, my voicemail hasn't worked. No big deal since I'm usually available to answer my phone. I can't say I've really missed it.
While procrastinating a bit with biology today, I decided to call and get it fixed. Sure enough, my cell provider had inadvertently put a code on it that made it inaccessible. A short phone call got the problem fixed and I was able to get it working again.
The problem...my history of voicemails was wiped out. I probably had 30 messages I had saved. They all transferred from one iPhone to the next from my very first iPhone many years ago. Over seven years to be exact.
Over those seven years, I'd kept the messages that meant the most to me. All of the messages contained a similar sentiment...they all had sweetness directed toward me.
There were messages from my niece, that I listened to when I missed her dearly. Some were from friends back home long before the move offering encouragement. Some were even from friends who are no longer in my life that I kept to remind me of the best of times. Some made me laugh and some made me cry.
There were some from extremely close friends who were concerned during the darkest of times. I listened to those when I felt alone. They've been especially helpful since moving.
Then there were many from my husband. Some were a profession of love, others an apology. I held onto those in case something ever happened to him. I don't think I could go on if I could never hear his voice again and feel the true love of his words.
After I realized they were all gone, I sat, deflated. All those voicemails, all that sweetness was just gone. Unrecoverable. Never to be heard again.
I'm not going to lie, I was angry. In an instant, I lost seven years of beautiful memories and all I got from the CSR was that technology isn't reliable.
Evidently, I am sentimental when it comes to voices that mean so much to me. It's not something I can recreate.
I hate to say this, but I instantly thought that this too was just another thing to make the past year crappy. It made me ready for this year to come to a close and hope for better in the next.
Even though I hadn't listened to any of the messages for a while, I already miss them. To anybody else, they were just a bunch of stupid messages. They were so much more to me. They were a lifeline to people who care. I know it's silly to cry over that, but I lost something valuable to me.
I think it's scary to consider that I might not fill up my mailbox again and definitely won't anytime soon.
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