11 February 2005

Had a bonfire today. Kind of. I've been going through all my old papers and disposing of the crap. There were a couple of things, I decided, that needed to be torched.

I tossed out a bunch of stuff: letters I'd forgotten to send, dumb little trinkets I have no use for, things that used to be sentimental, but the significance of which I can't entirely remember, old calendars and planners...

And then I burned some things... These were mostly pictures of Jake and me. There is no place whatsoever in my life for Jake. The relationship is over and done with, and I have no reason in the world to want to keep pictures of the two of us -- him looking pissed off, me looking strained and obviously having spent some time crying -- posing unhappily in front of a mountain.

Generally, I'm a packrat and keep everything. I keep swearing I'm going to make it all into some comprehensive record of my life or something. I'm an album-maker who's far too disorganized to bother with albums. I've kept pictures, clothes, and all sorts of mementoes from all sorts of relationships. And I'm not really sure I'll be able to completely mend my packrat ways. For example, I couldn't bear to part with a receipt for a couple of chicken sandwiches Neil and I had back in June in Seattle. It was a DATE, dammit, and it was a GOOD date, and almost all of our dates ended up being the absolute happiest day of my life, and because I'm a complete dork and totally cheesy, I'm saving the stupid receipt.

However...

The old relationships have got to go.

The pictures of Jake and me got burned. Burning things and scattering the ashes, I've heard, is the proper way to dispose of things you don't want to ever come back to haunt you. I didn't bother with a big elaborate ritual or anything, just grabbed a candle and burned all the shit out on the porch on top of a shitty old baking sheet. There were a couple of birthday cards and notes and things among the photos -- a card that called me a whore, a letter describing how I'd ruined his life because of my insensitivity to his pain... Fucking bullshit like that. It's burned now, into little crunchy ashes, which I'm going to scatter from an overpass later today, I think.

Then there's an old journal I found... A book of love letters, basically, to somebody I loved once. I read a few pages of it, and it's not nearly as awful as I had suspected, but it still needs to go. The individual to whom the letters were addressed never saw them, and I suspect I never REALLY intended for him to see them. I loved him and I wrote him letters telling him all kinds of things about my life and my thoughts. But I knew even at the time that he wouldn't really be interested -- and even if he were, our relationship was doomed before it ever could have begun. That was fine. Kind of saddening at the time, but fine in the long run. I wrote him letters because I had no one else to whom I could write letters. And because even though I never gave them to him, I knew he'd understand -- one of very, very, VERY few people who ever could have.

I'm going to bury that journal. I haven't decided where yet, though. I suppose it doesn't really matter. He is an earth sign. And so I will give the letters to the earth. Let the earth dispose of them.

...Then there were the pages and pages of rough draft from my book. I used to burn those -- set up a big ceremony in the woods, all by myself, and torch them. This was because I figured they'd distract me if I kept them around; I had this supersitition that I couldn't write anything new and good if the old crap was lying around. But there's nowhere around here that's really safe for a real bonfire, so I sacrificed those in a way befitting my book: I soaked them in coffee until they were beginning to disintegrate.

(We brew some mad strong coffee...)

I feel cleaner now.

>center>* * * * * * * * * * *

If all goes well, Neil and I are getting married this week.

There are few parts of my past that I'm actually genuinely ashamed of. They've made me who I am. And I'm pretty cool, I think. I like myself, mostly. So there's little room for regret.

I would not try to destroy any parts of my past out of shame or whatever. They happened. That's all there is to it. But I really think that destroying the things I destroyed today was a good thing. There's a difference between denying that one's past ever happened, and denying it the right to drain any more of one's energy.

My energy is my own now, to do with as I choose. And so I choose to share it with Neil and Bean. It occurred to me last night that I couldn't, in good conscience, take Neil to be my lawfully wedded husband and all that business, if I still kept -- for whatever reason -- the stuff I got rid of. Some of the pictures and letters and stuff (not all of them were from Jake) reflected some really good times. But they're over.

Live and let die.

I feel cleaner now. Clean enough to actually offer Neil my hand in marriage without the slightest hesitation.

Stupid, maybe, but it was important to me.

>center>* * * * * * * * * * *

Bean is crying. She's making this angry little "feed-me" noise that sounds like "MAAAAAAAAAA!"

She sounds like a very small, very mad, sheep.

It's absolutely adorable.

Going to go feed her now...

~Helena*