I wish I could say that it happened unexpectedly—that I was caught off-guard, devastated, and a little freaked. But I can’t say that.

The truth is, it was a long time coming, and quite frankly, a good time to say goodbye.

I had had it for five years. It got me through four, rather tumultuous, years of high school, and my freshman year of college, surpassing its life expectancy.

When it came time to decide if I needed a new laptop for college, I told my parents that I wanted to keep it. I didn’t need the newest, greatest thing. It still worked well. And plus, somewhere in its complicated, technological system, of which I have no understanding, it had the past four years of my life documented in some way.

About halfway through my freshman year of college, it became very slow. It would shut off at random times. And it couldn’t handle too many commands at once, like it used to.

So when the screen turned green—yes, green—and fizzled out, I was not disbelieving.

But, yes, it was still strange to let go.

See, up until high school I did all of my school assignments, online browsing, and computer games on an old desktop located in my dad’s study, right across from his computer, bookcases, TV, and multiple stacks of important of paper.

We would work simultaneously, alongside one another—me, mostly on Barbie computer games, my dad, on actual work. I’d like to think we bonded in this way, in our undefined office space.

The summer before my freshman year of high school, it was time to move on. My parents invested in a new laptop for me so that I wouldn’t have to keep using the slow, communal computer in the study.

An anti-Mac person, I entered Best Buy on an unremarkable August day, expecting to come out with a small, black Dell laptop. I walked out with a relatively larger, brown Samsung laptop.

I didn’t like it too much at first. I didn’t like that the screen was significantly smaller than the one I was used to. I didn’t like that it didn’t come with a mouse. And though it wasn’t a huge problem, I didn’t like that there wasn’t space for it in my dad’s study.

Needless to say, I adjusted. Though I didn’t need to take it to school as much as I had anticipated, I liked that it was portable. I liked that it contained only my documents, my essays, my PowerPoint presentations, my photos, my search history, and my passwords locked into its websites.

Of course, I didn’t realize how much I liked it until this past Sunday—a day that I will now remember as The Crash of ’16—the day it all disappeared.

I need to preface this article and, unfortunately, make it slightly less dramatic, by mentioning that the majority of my work was backed up on a separate hard drive after I graduated high school in June 2015. As for the rest of it—everything from my first year of college, between June 2015 and now—I was able to recover some. Most is not lost.

What I can't recover, though, are the late nights that I spent in high school, finishing an essay at the dining room table. True, these nights were awful, I hated them. But also true, they contributed a lot to my high school experience, my childhood. I'll argue that I acquired a good work ethic, some endurance, and an abundance of creative writing experience, from the late nights spent staring at that screen.

I can't recover college app months or exam weeks.

I can't recover receiving messages from friends or scrutinizing emails to teachers and authority figures.

I can't recover the hours I spent on social networks.

I can't recover my "favorites" tab, with all of the articles and random blogs I found cool over the years. And I will have to teach my new laptop to remember all of the passwords that I can never remember myself.

I can't recover the time I spilled orange bubble tea all over the keys and still found remnants of that bubble tea months after.

I can't recover the malfunctioning shift key that wouldn't "shift" by the end, or the space bar, the bane of my existence, of which, in order to get the necessary result, I had to press the right-most edge.

I can't recover the many times I lugged the thing around campus. I have some back problems, so if you've ever seen a disgruntled-looking girl carrying a nineteen-inch laptop, it was most likely me.

I can't recover movie nights with friends, the Statistics software I downloaded for a class, or the scattered placement of icons on my desktop that I knew so very well.

To my first laptop, I will miss watching Netflix on you, using you to shop online, and crying in your presence late at night because I procrastinated on a school project. Perhaps what I will miss most are the insignificant moments I spent browsing random websites, perusing Pinterest, and taking Buzzfeed quizzes.

I'm sorry you got drenched in water that one time when it was raining. And I'm sorry I got so annoyed at the end when I overloaded you and you couldn't function.

Thanks a bunch for the last five years!