Yesterday did indeed fly by. I made my way back from London to our small and cozy house, noting how dark it was from lack of people and lack of sunlight, the rain clouds spilling outside and painting the world in mist. Walking to the kitchen, there on the refrigerator is a post-it from Mr. Y with a loving message. It touches me, and on closer inspection, I find two others in different places in the house.

What a man. Am I making you ill yet with my romantic idolatry?

I do a bit of blogging. A bit of work. Finish a book I was reading. I drink a beer and have an enormous bubble bath, courtesy of Lush (my new best friend), complete with lit candles and the window open, inviting the rain to bounce around the bathroom. After that, I get out and have my Mexican breakfast burritos (she had burritos. And she declared that they were good.)

I watched crappy Paramount TV, then around midnight I figured it was time to go to bed. I took my book and my pajama'd self upstairs, and upon pulling back the covers, I see that Mr. Y has left me a very sweet and very loving letter in the bed. I get a text from him that is sweet and heart-breaking at the same time, and I curse the inability for mobile phones to be able to let me reach my hands out and hold him and whisper in his ear how wonderful he is.

A quick round of self-relations and I heed Martha's advice-I surround myself with pillows and fall asleep, clutching one.

When I wake up this morning I see the letter Mr. Y left me in the bed proudly on display on my dresser. If I could, if it wouldn't be too hokey and make people within a 5 mile radius vomit, I would frame it with his post-it notes to that I could always have it. Love letters are, to me, the essence of it all, the center, the one thing that a person can always have.

And it made me think. Somewhere deep inside a frozen storage unit in Sweden is a cardboard box that has been lugged across two countries (and will be lugged here, shortly). It has seen some wear and tear, and it's not a box that I go into that often. Inside of the bumpy and rattly box are small ribbonned bundles, bundles that come in various sizes, bundles that come in various emotional investment.

Love letters.
They're love letters from old lovers.
And I won't throw them away.

I don't ever go in the box and open up the ribbons, I don't really feel the need to read the letters again. I think about each ribboned bundle and I remember what it was like to be with that person, what it was like to be loved like that, in that way, by that person. The box contains the detritus of every possible stretch of relationship-letters, pictures, programs, momentos, trinkets. It's not that I want any of these things, it's more like I want to be able to remember what each person and each relationship was about.

There's a few letters from Carl, hastily written on the back of book order forms, as he left them beneath my windshield wiper on my car, in the parking lot of the bookstore we worked in together. Carl and I never had a proper relationship, we never dated, but he was someone I cared about a lot. Tall, brooding, dark brown eyes and tattooes on his arm that told of a youthful past gone wrong. The last time I heard from him was on one of those book order forms on my windshield, telling me that he could stand outside the store and watch me forever, before he fled into the night, never to be seen in the book store again.

There are some cards from my first husband, a short jerky-moving Italian man with forearms like Popeye. He was never one for words, he hated reading, and his cards don't make much sense. I don't think I have opened that bundle since leaving him, but seeing as he's one of the exes that I care about the least, that I have the most to forget him for, maybe that bundle will always stay ribboned. He called me Cat Eyes. I call him a Mistake.

There are a number of love letters from a man I called the Painter. I'm not sure how he got that name, I never know how they get their names, I only know it had something to do with a girlie evening and too much wine, and unfortunately for him the name stuck. He was a weight-lifter, a chemist, and a man with whom I had nothing in common. When we had the purely unsatisfying sex he moved like a rabbit, bucked-teeth and all. Our relationship was short (not short enough) and I am not sorry when I say I hardly think about him.

One large bundle comes from Michael (weird, but that seems to be the post that Mr. Y got named in), a very tall man with thinning hair that was my boyfriend for quite a while. Michael thought everything was a wildly romantic jaunt, a moment of Renaissance to be captured forever, and his letters reflected it. He liked me best when I was sitting down, my head leaning on my hand. He liked me when I was what he wanted me to be. And I liked him before he slapped me and threw me out of the house, naked.

There are several bundles in that box, and also in that box is the Silver Box, a box which I will never let go of.

The only bundle not in that unit is the collection of letters I have from Mr. Y.
Those are here with me.
And you know, I never had his letters in the box. They've always been seperate.

So I have a box. And Mr. Y knows about it and, in fact, when the box gets here he is more than welcome to look through it. I know that he has a box as well, and his box is welcome in our home too. He has love letters from me, in fact. Long, hand-written numbers that may gracefully grow old inside of their small and neat envelopes. And even more so, he has this blog-this blog, where I lay my heart on the line and tell him and everyone who stops by here (sometimes on a daily basis) just how much he means to me.

I'm not one of those women who demand their lovers burn the evidence of past loves, I don't think throwing old lovers into a fire really rids you of them. I think people should keep the love letters, the pictures, the momentos. Keep them in a box and let them serve as a reminder of what it was like to be loved like that once upon a time, and what it's like to be loved now.

That's what my letters do.
I wonder where I can get a frame for my latest love letter.
And if you'll excuse me, Cole's "The Very Thought of You" is on my iTunes, and I need to go listen to it and miss someone.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 10:02 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
Post contains 1250 words, total size 7 kb.