What do you do with 36 years’ of birthdays, and valentines, and Christmases and just-because-I-love-you’s? Times two. I’d kept them all and so had he. Some few were lost in the flat clearance that I’d left in hands other than mine, but most he had brought with him here, and all of mine were here. Mine to him, his to me. Thirty-six years, times two. Over and over the same few words. Variations on a theme of I love you and always will.
Only always is not the same as forever, because death does us part and while love lingers, it was never meant to stifle.
So there comes a time when all of those cards and notes must be dealt with. Clearly you cannot simply discard them. You don’t simply shred and bin 36 years of love and laughter and silliness and romance and hope and sadness and steadfastness and recovery. It deserves more than that.
I have a fire burning in the garden. I don’t trust fire. I’m wood-water, how could I possibly feel safe with fire? So I stay to watch over it, and while I’m watching, I find that I cannot do anything else, cannot think about anything else. A heat haze shimmers around the fire-bin, or it billows smoke. Heat. Flames. Smoke. I imagine a releasing of all our years’ worth of being, together and apart, laughing and loving, arguing and crying, very occasionally but surprisingly rarely shouting, and sleeping, waking, hoping and failing. All the words and all the silences. All the perfect days and nights, and all the other ones.
We held a lot between us. In our heads and hands and in our hearts. The best of that I know I carry forward to share out among whoever seems most in need of it, or with whoever I most need to share it, which may not be the same thing.
So much else of it, though, never made any sense to anyone but us and that I cannot carry alone. There is no-one to hand it down to, and so I must let it go.
I could keep all of these messages in a box and take them out now & then to remind me of how we were. But that implies that I will somehow forget. I don’t think so. And to read them again, without the sharing of the memories, simply makes me sad. The world has sadness enough without my adding to it.
Or I could put the box away in the loft where I never go, to be found by whoever comes along when I am gone from here. But such people would only find so many pieces of paper with oft-repeated messages. Not one of them is even dated. I could place some of them in time by which cats were co-signatories or by the address on the envelope. Only, I didn’t keep the envelopes. No-one else would see anything remotely special in here. They would not feel the words, feel the different tenor of them as they fluctuated in meaning, ebbed and flowed, as we were weaker and stronger, as the years passed and we dealt with the life we found ourselves living, which I don’t think was the one either of us chose – except insofar as we hadn’t chosen a different one.
There is no point to keeping them now – all these birthday cards, and valentines, and Christmas cards, and I saw this and thought of you cards – so, as they cannot be kept, they must at least be honoured in their being let go. Watched upon their way.
I wonder where smoke goes.
And I wonder what I will do with the ash.
The fire-bin is small and my ability to sit and watch, also. It will take more than one burning to release all of the years.
I knew that when I put things into the not now boxes, I was also putting them into sometime boxes. Many of them have already been emptied. This is one of the hardest.
Just because the time is right to do something doesn’t mean that it’s not a hard and sad thing to do. Just because it is a hard and sad thing to do, doesn’t mean that it isn’t the right time.
And so I sit and spin words, while every so often I am wreathed in smoke.
