After nine years I burned up my letters. Many times before I imagined what it would feel like to watch their cinders float away. I thought I would be made lighter somehow without the weight of them in my pocket. Two simple scraps of paper scrawled with indecipherable meaning. Why did they hold such significance? I have written about them before, and now as I go back to read my own words I feel a sense of loss inside myself. Giving up that which I held so much belief in makes me wonder if I had ever believed at all.
I question my motives in their destruction. Did I burn them because I was told I should or because I knew I needed to? What was gained from this? Did I feel like their prophecy had been fulfilled so I no longer needed them? Did I hope it would disconnect me further from the one who wrote them? It’s not fair. In my dreams I can still reach into my wallet and pull out the letters in their original beauty. Pencil strokes unfaded by time. I remember them, word for word, because of the countless times I read them in desperate moments of melancholy. I could recite them to you now or in a thousand years. Like myself, those letters are and are not as wonderful as I think they are.