Archive to Ashes

"You don’t really need these anymore, do you?" he said as I watched the flames creep around the shoebox, searching for a corner to bite into. The rising tone at the end of the question was just a formality. He didn’t want an answer. The fire was lit before I could blink. My nostrils filled with the sickening smell of lighter fluid.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t fight. I just stood there thinking he was right. And I wanted him to be.

Anything other than him being right in that moment would’ve meant I just calmly witnessed years of my life documented, in flames.

Years of thoughts—from my teenage self into adulthood, burnt.

Tens, if not hundreds, of letters that had helped me get through a difficult time, gone.

The rawest material for a memoir I'd started planning in the back of my mind, turned to ashes.

So I needed him to be right. I needed not to need these any more.

/

That fire was the beginning of four years of my life when I didn’t write a single word outside of text messages explaining why I wasn’t home yet. Or something else I'd apparently done wrong.

But before that fire, a break-up happened. One that destroyed me. One that made the fire and everything that followed possible. One that left me in a fetal position on the floor of a shitty little apartment, staring at a peeling corner of a parquet panel.

Once I finally got up, I vowed to myself the next relationship would be my last one, that the next one would be The One.

Little did I know I’d barely survive the next one.

I ached from the thought that I had to start from zero, especially because I’d been certain that the guy who’d just packed up and left while I was at work was the one I’d spend my life with.

I didn’t know how to be with myself. I didn’t know how to love myself. I don’t think I even liked myself.

If he couldn’t love me, there must have been something wrong with me, right?

I wanted to skip the dating and getting to know each other part. I wanted to skip to the safe part, to the happily ever after. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be held and cared for. I wanted to ignore the pain and pretend the heartbreak didn't happen.

So when I met the one I thought was The One, his constant attention and grand gestures seemed a dream come true to my bruised heart, not the love-bombing it really was.

He made me think he wanted the same as I did—something serious. He seemed to tick all the boxes, including the one where I got to skip the beginning.

Each time a warning alarm should’ve gone off in my brain, my irises turned to pink hearts instead.

Two months later, we moved in together and he asked about the shoebox I kept in my drawer.

So I told him.

I explained to my new "perfect" partner what the notebooks contained and what they meant to me.

I told him about the ones that were filled with completed stories and the one where I jotted down new ideas for the next ones.

I told him about journals that were filled with thoughts, memories and experiences with the occasional photo here and there.

And I told him about a pile of notebooks that contained letters to an old boyfriend. He was in the army back then and I often found myself writing letters to him. Most of which he never saw, but that wasn't the point. It was for me. Whenever we couldn’t talk, I wrote as if I was speaking to him. I told him about my day, all my thoughts and dreams and ideas. The corners of my heart were spread on those pages in the rawest form possible.

I told that man how I loved writing and journaling and what it meant to me. I excitedly told him how one day I planned to use these to put together a memoir. How this box full of notebooks was perfect material with the honest and authentic thoughts in chronological order. How I loved that I had years of myself on paper. How I got to go back to these thoughts whenever I wanted.

He listened. Quietly. Carefully. I just didn’t know how that silence should've been interpreted. I thought it meant he cared. Silly me.

A short while later, we visited his family’s summer house for the weekend and as it turned out he had packed my shoebox with us.

"I thought we should get rid of everything we don’t need any more. Now that we’re starting a new life together we shouldn’t keep memories of old partners in our home," he explained as he made his way to the old grill.

I never questioned the fact that "everything we didn’t need anymore" only referred to my journals.

I was still convinced that I was too hard, near impossible, to love and if that made it easier for him, then so be it.

What’s a few notebooks, for a lifetime of love, right?

Tears of anger are flowing down my face as I’m writing this today, as I’m realising how fucking easy prey I was to him. He didn’t have to lift a finger to break me. I was already shattered. He only had to mould me into something manageable to him. And that he did.

You could easily say it was my own fault for not stopping him.

For years, I said that too.

God knows I’ve blamed myself for it more than anyone else ever could. There’s nothing you could say that I haven’t said to myself already.

No amount of blame or consolation, hate or love, will bring back those hundreds of pages of memories, thoughts, late-night ideas and lovelorn letters.

No amount of tears will help that memoir see the light of day.

No amount of anything will bring back the shoebox—my archive—that was burned to ashes in an old rusted kettle grill out of mere jealousy.