Unpacking
Unpacking boxes, I am finding all kinds of things I forgot about.
Tonight, I was about to pack it in and go to to bed at about 1:30.
Then, I found the longest love letter I've ever written. It's a book. One of those blank journals? I don't even know how many pages it is. Definitely fifty; maybe a hundred. It took me a full three months to write.
I obviously didn't send it. I feel like Beatrice Baudelaire. And there is a very reckless, very hopeful part of me that is tempted to send it now, years after the fact, because I don't feel any differently than I did when I wrote it. I do about some things; I've grown up, I've mellowed out, I've become more pragmatic and poised.
But not so pragmatic that I throw out fifty-page love letters I'll never send. It took me till three before I put it down-- and I didn't finish it, mind. I set it down, skimming through the second half. Only skimming. Finding the part where I finally declare "I love you," a full three quarters through the letter.
I am finding poetry and stories. A novella, illustrated, that was another love letter to someone else, also never sent. Never given, I should say, it was meant as a gift and then somewhere along the way I realized the person it was intended for would never care that I had written a book for them and them alone. I don't know. Maybe they would. There was a time when they would have cared immensely.
It's pretty wretched prose now, though. I would be mortified if someone gave this to me.
So far, now that the love-letter-book is found (and oh, how telling it is, and wonderful to read the intellectual curiosity I had at that age at work and on a page and swelling with fervor to find someone else who understood it and challenged it without competition), the only thing not found that I truly care about is my Pez collection. What does that say about me, really, that the things with the deepest meaning to me as reminders of a youth well-spent are an unsent love-letter that took a season to write, a Ouija Board from 1920, my tarot decks, collections of juvenile writing, books, and my Pez dispensers?
Really, what does it mean?
The most wonderful thing about reading that letter is now I feel inspired to live up to being the person I hoped I would be when I wrote it. And oh, god, I want the person I wrote it to to be what they wanted to be.
Remember, all of you, even though this letter was not to you (because it was only to one person, so it could not be to all of you, and it was to someone I knew before the advent of this journal, and that rules out all but a select few of you), that there is something in the universe that is deserving of your deep and complete love.
Tonight, I was about to pack it in and go to to bed at about 1:30.
Then, I found the longest love letter I've ever written. It's a book. One of those blank journals? I don't even know how many pages it is. Definitely fifty; maybe a hundred. It took me a full three months to write.
I obviously didn't send it. I feel like Beatrice Baudelaire. And there is a very reckless, very hopeful part of me that is tempted to send it now, years after the fact, because I don't feel any differently than I did when I wrote it. I do about some things; I've grown up, I've mellowed out, I've become more pragmatic and poised.
But not so pragmatic that I throw out fifty-page love letters I'll never send. It took me till three before I put it down-- and I didn't finish it, mind. I set it down, skimming through the second half. Only skimming. Finding the part where I finally declare "I love you," a full three quarters through the letter.
I am finding poetry and stories. A novella, illustrated, that was another love letter to someone else, also never sent. Never given, I should say, it was meant as a gift and then somewhere along the way I realized the person it was intended for would never care that I had written a book for them and them alone. I don't know. Maybe they would. There was a time when they would have cared immensely.
It's pretty wretched prose now, though. I would be mortified if someone gave this to me.
So far, now that the love-letter-book is found (and oh, how telling it is, and wonderful to read the intellectual curiosity I had at that age at work and on a page and swelling with fervor to find someone else who understood it and challenged it without competition), the only thing not found that I truly care about is my Pez collection. What does that say about me, really, that the things with the deepest meaning to me as reminders of a youth well-spent are an unsent love-letter that took a season to write, a Ouija Board from 1920, my tarot decks, collections of juvenile writing, books, and my Pez dispensers?
Really, what does it mean?
The most wonderful thing about reading that letter is now I feel inspired to live up to being the person I hoped I would be when I wrote it. And oh, god, I want the person I wrote it to to be what they wanted to be.
Remember, all of you, even though this letter was not to you (because it was only to one person, so it could not be to all of you, and it was to someone I knew before the advent of this journal, and that rules out all but a select few of you), that there is something in the universe that is deserving of your deep and complete love.