Today, we're burning the past in a commandeered 55-gallon garbage can. We’re burning all of the heretics of our yesterdays at the stake; we're giving all the mementos of heartbreakers that we've ever known a true trial by fire - without a jury. There’s smoke and it's everywhere, and tomorrow morning you will smell it in our clothes and hair. We’re declaring war on all of the lies and broken promises that anyone ever made to us, foolishly committed to paper. 

She’s crying as she throws the photographs into the flames. One trembling handful followed by another, and another. I pause and I debate the consequence of our actions, each irrevocable motion forever banishing both the good things and the bad. With time, even the memories will blur. I hear the rose-filled vodka bottle crack at the bottom if the furnace, imagining the glass as it begins to glow. Into the fire, the novel I never finished. Into the fire, pages and pages of alternate histories, of better tomorrows for both of us, of the imaginary people who get trapped inside of everyone's heads. Today, they die. Today, we are free.

She pauses for a moment, and I watch as she lights a cigarette. She takes a long drag, half closing her left eye while raising her right eyebrow, and with her eyes she is asking me what, or who, or when I will destroy next. So as the glowing ashes rise, all drifting on the temperature flows, I pick up notebooks, illegibly scribed with music. I pick up scrapbooks, overflowing with magazine clippings and articles. I pick up so many letters from lovers who walked out in the morning but still haven't returned. I pick up bloody knives and smashed toy cars and casings of bullets and broken microchips. All rise, please move towards the fire. 

In the end, there's nothing that can be saved.

And now, she steps closer and kisses me. Her lower lip is warm, her nose is cold. Her hands are on my chest, fingers spread out as if to grab me, or to stop me, or perhaps to push me away. In a motion, she turns, and she wraps her arms around me, and she's standing behind me. Like a little kid, she's peeking at the fire: curious. Afraid. And here we remain, together, forever, observing the warm glowing corpses of our pasts.

 

 

-2