The pen is mightier than the heart

The other night, I was doing a little spring cleaning and a piece of folded paper fell on my lap. It was a copy of a love letter I’d written years ago to a boy who was moving away. It was beautifully composed (in my humblest opinion), with a delicate balance of emotion, honesty, vulnerability and age-appropriate cheesiness. As I read it, I was quickly transformed into my 27-year-old self who carefully penned that heartfelt tribute and even more carefully, quietly left it in a Pepperdine University envelope on the recipient’s bedside table the morning of his one-way-ticket flight. His closet was empty and there were two large moving boxes on the bedroom floor.

Anyhow, that relationship wasn’t meant to be but the words and emotion expressed on that paper are very much alive, or rather, they come to life when they’re read. The memories and bittersweet feelings of sadness, longing and acceptance all flooded back… but dissapated as soon as I refolded the letter.

Much of my life is documented in writing, from innocent childhood stories to angry adolescent poetry to the “What’s it all mean?” journal entries I keep to this very day. Most make me laugh, others cause me to cringe, some I just don’t remember… and then there are those that are still too painful to read.

Raw emotion on paper is sometimes just too real.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it all. I’ve said that they should all be buried with me because I don’t ever want anyone to read them. At the same time, the writer in me says there’s a story in there somewhere. Until I can wrap my brain around it, the plot continues. But whenever I want to take a trip down memory lane to learn a lesson from my past or to keep things in perspective, all I have to do is pull one of those papers, notebooks or journals out of my secret hiding place and read.

Time travel is possible.