(Mom and Dad, if you've stumbled on this address, please skip this.)
...going through this box of your letters. I ignored it for a long time: its mass a testament to what we once had. But now it's just another box, more cumbersome than nostalgic. The moment I gave myself permission to throw out any letters I didn't want to keep without offering to return them to you, it became easy.
You may offer me mine again someday, and I'll probably take them; but if you ask for yours in exchange, I won't apologize for having chucked the ones I could've returned. You'll understand why.
I can't quite bring myself to toss the contents of the box sight unseen, so I've been reading them. Actually, I started with the intent to reread them all, but soon realized there was so little of interest to me now that I've just been skimming. We used legal pads and frequently wrote 20 page letters after all, and it's a sizeable box. The postcards I've set aside, I have mixed feelings about, but the growing pile of discards puts me at ease.
how long has it been?
ReplyDeleteit takes me forever to address that kind of thing, though i'm not quite the sentimental fool i once was.
I'm a little embarrassed to say 9 years, no fuck, it's 10. I think it was harder to do because we remained good friends all that time. In the past year or two I've felt taken for granted, so it was good to reexamine what we had, and it made it easier.
ReplyDelete