Dear Old Lover,
Ooh, I found the last of your old letters and poems; there was a choice, a forking path: toss them or read them? I took the second, and as as happened before, I saw that it was not just awfulness and neediness and greed, that there was care and compassion, and for us, maybe, as people just learning to swim, there may even have been some of what they call 'love.' Certainly, there was passion, which is a kind of an absurd thing, with a lot of sequins and glitter and flashing lights and too much of everything on it. A great, elaborate, frosted cake of passion, with little to sustain anyone in it. And yet. I do love a celebration with cake.
One doesn't want, as one becomes, to pretend that it never happened.
The next forking path: what to do with these last words, these recorded emotions of yours, but also somehow mine, as they were directed to me? I am reading- like writing in reverse, words go in, instead of out- I am reading a book about the daughters of patriarchy, and I see, that I am so much a one, even as I struggle to shed that mantle, and so, and so, I will burn them, because there is or was a thing there, an energy that can be released, I think, as smoke now.
Yes; burning will be just reverence enough.
