The burning of your written work.

Is there something worse than the burning of writing? There's crumpling of paper being thrown into a trashcan. There's the tearing of paper into pieces. There's the slipping of paper, untorn, into the recycling bin. That's all destruction. Maybe there's some frustration behind it all until it's resolved with those sounds. Then there's the infactuation with the burning of gifts from old lovers: mixtapes, stuffed animals or pictures. You need them to be gone, destroyed and never found. That's why they are burned. There's something hateful, destructive about burning anything.

And what if the gifts are letters someone has sent through the mail. They have dates. They are a history of something and you've carried them across state lines all the way to Texas. I don't want these letters destroyed. I don't want to throw them in the trash, but I don't want to carry them around with me anymore. Something needs to be done with them.

I thought I was going to write a book. Take the letters and homemade envelopes to Kinkos and photocopy them on the color printers. Put them inbetween the written pages of a book that was in the form of letters to someone else. That was the idea for almost 2 years. I wrote some and then stopped. I couldn't humble myself enough. I couldn't honestly put myself into the story to make it any good. My New Year's resolution is, "To be honest in your writing, even if you're afraid someone will get angry with you." (This is actually why I don't write so muchbecause I can't show it to anyone.)

The letters have just sat in a box, building up as more came in the mail. The other night when I couldn't sleep, I opened the box and took the letters out. I read each one. I hadn't read any of them since one would arrive. I'm not really the type to go back and look at things over and over, (Although I do replay conversations in my head. They are not tangible so I need to try to grasp them.) but this particular night I pulled the letters out of the box. The letters were spread out between 3 different addresses for me and 4 different return addresses, though one address was a lot fewer since I didn't want to write for a couple of months. That's right, I'm stubborn. My favorite were the first letters. They were the ones written months before anything happened like the one where she said we should sit closer together because she liked the way I smelled.

The only solution is to bury them. That way maybe someone will find them, dig them up, and carefully sort through them like they are old newspaper clippings or a hidden treasure. I want to drive out somewhere in Texas and bury this stack of letters I brought to down here with me. I want to tie them with a ribbon in chronlogical order and hide them under an Oak. Or I should find an attic. But there's also a story waiting to be written on the way to bury them, some significance to it all. I want to write that, but mostly I want to let go. (There, that's me being honest.)