Some of my memories has gone

Alright, this isn't really the first thing that I normally do in the morning after I wake up. But, today I realized that I owed several blog posts to write, so, here is one for today.

I'm gonna talk to you about evil termites. Since high school, I have been interested in reading novels. Since then, I have been collecting novels written by different authors. Because we moved house (and island, too!), I had to pack all my novels in carton boxes. I then realized that I couldn't keep the books in the boxes all the time or for a long time. In the new house, I took them out of the boxes and organized them. A year later, we moved house again, only this time it was in the same city.

And, of course, I had to pack all the books again plus new collection that I had bought during the year.

In the new house where I live now, I had my own room. I took the books out and organized them well. Some years later as I went to college and stuff, I got a job offer in Papua that I actually took. I left for a couple of months. After that, I returned to my parents' house.

Then, only a couple of weeks since my return from Papua, I went to Singapore and stayed there for just about two years(!). Of course, I still visited my parents once a month or so.

So, basically, since I wasn't in the house for quite a long time, my parents decided to rent out my room. I wasn't happy at all with the idea but I was too far away that I couldn't stop them and there was no real reason why I would stop them.

When I paid my parents a visit just before the room was occupied by a tenant, I had to pack my stuff including my books. At that time, we didn't have small boxes where I could have put my books. Instead, I used a big suitcase. I organized the books in the suitcase and zip it off tightly so no bugs or anything would have access to getting inside it.

All done, I went back to Singapore.

A couple of years later when I was back home already with my parents, at one time just earlier this year, I had a talk with my niece about me having written a novel. I told her that I had written a novel and wanted to show it to her. So, I was looking for the novel and the first place I went to was my book suitcase. I opened the suitcase and the novel wasn't there. I then looked at other places in the house. I think I've lost it.

Long story short, on August 20th this year (I remember the exact date because I posted a status on my Facebook wall), we had a leak in the storage room where I'd always had the book suitcase placed there! I was worried about my books. I checked the outer part of the suitcase and it wasn't wet, so pheww.

While the leak was being fixed, I then thought about looking inside the suitcase again in case I could find my missing novel. Maybe it was always there but I wasn't paying so much attention when I was looking for it a couple months back.

And, what happened next shocked me to death!

I'm not going to freak out here right now because I already did for a couple of days when I opened the suitcase on that day.

Basically, most of my precious books were eaten by termites.

...................................................... there, my soul dies for a moment.

I was speechless, sad, VERY sad, and wanted to cry. I had collected and bought the books with my money since I was in high school. There was too much memory to let go by throwing away the damaged, unrecognizable books. I remember we had this Harry Potter club in high school. There were me and three friends of mine in the group. And, every time I bought a Harry Potter book, I would write a note on the very first page after the cover about when I bought the book, what my friends in the group thought about the story, and other stuff that I would never want in my life to forget.

All of that has gone now into ashes. My mom had to burn the damaged pages in the fire. Nobody will ever understand how I felt at that time. My soul died.

I wish I could put all the feelings that I had at that time into words here right now. Instead, I'm just gonna show you some pictures and I will write something underneath each picture to help you know what's going on in the picture.

This is the first moment when I found the termites were still eating my books with their sharp most evil, heartless teeth

Look at those termites who have also eaten my soul alive!

It used to be a Harry Potter book

Another used-to-be Harry Potter book

The rest of the books that both survived and *kind of survived* are for now kept in these small boxes
And, by the way, I still keep the covers of the damaged Harry Potter books shown in the pictures above. Some day, when I am much older, I may find this horrible event sweet (as a memory) when looking at the surviving covers.