this was stef nearly four years ago

burning time

I really should burn my old letters. For one thing, they’re dust catchers, then they’re a fire hazard, and last, they hold old, staleexpired memories that one doesn’t need remembering.

I was going through my old journals for more quotes on time when I stumbled upon a crumpled page of a notebook with a vaguely familiar handwriting I haven’t seen in ages.

Alarms rang in my head. “Don’t read it!” my commonsense screamed, “Don’t even think of reading it! Put it back, close the journal and step away very slowly! Tomorrow, pick it up with tweezers and burn it!”

I unfolded the paper and read it. It was a letter—just one of those old high school spill-my-guts-out kind of letters. You could practically see the blood dripping from the page from its honesty. It was kinda funny now. Kinda. I had totally forgotten about it until now, and after reading it, memories started flooding in. Not exactly about the time and place when I got the letter, but that feeling of dread and confusion and a little bit of anger while i was reading it at the time. I don’t know why. Questions blared through my head,
“So where is he now?”
“So much for ‘all time’.”
“Whatever happened to ‘whatever happens’?”

I can’t help but expect people to keep their promises even if I don’t want them to. It’s stupid of me to expect it, but i still do.

This was a long time ago… it’s just funny reading all the promises of forever that a person can make in the heat of romantic emotion (aka delusion) and looking at it in the light of the time passed.

Time changes people. It’s not because we change on purpose, but it sneaks up on us until it has completely taken over everything—our words, our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, and everything around us, from the way things appear to us, to the buildings, and our friends– even in how we evaluate our past and see our future.

I guess this is why I don’t like saying everything all at once. This is why I’m afraid to say that i commit my heart to anything or to anybody. Words trap me while change pulls on my hands tied to chains.

I don’t want anybody to feel the same way I did when I read that letter. I don’t want anybody to ask of me,
“So where is she now?”
“I thought she said she will never let anything happen between us?”

“Wow, I thought forever would be much longer.”

(14 October 2003)

Funny how this feels like i just wrote it now.