I wish I could have both. Rebase to stick to single clean commit messages, but still preserve the history/order of modifications within that, even without the messages.

I might work on a project for a week, write some code, do an intermediate commit, realize it's not needed, delete it. Then when I finally merge into master (rebase), that code I wrote is forever gone. Which I think is fine, but two months later I realize I could actually use it. But there's no way to get at it, is there? Or am I missing something?