Old Letters

Isn’t it funny how feelings can alter – so fast, or so gradual, you seem to be dragging the nights away? Or how sentiments can be so violent and with the burning fire of a thousand suns for a few months and then now you’re wondering how you came to be with that person? It’s troubling. It’s a concoction of bewilderment and nostalgia and it can make us feel so susceptible and defenseless to our very own selves. Then you remember, spending time with this person, the happy times as well as the bad ones. Time flies so fast and our most beautiful memories has tuned into nothing but mere letters.

I look back at photos of us from times that tears in my eyes starts to build up wanting to go back. I lingered over text messages I’ve saved for as long as I first received it. The times of innocence, of not caring, of late nights and very early mornings. In my memory box you are alive and in my computer, there’s a hidden folder where I keep a part of us that only look better the farther behind us they get.

I feel as if there is a need, to get rid of all these evidences – these stupid emotions I had let myself indulge into. The thing that made me depressed for a while. I have been a very good fool once, but I swear never again. The space of you in my memory box will be taken up by recent photos of my new friends and adventures I had without your company.

Reading the old letters, the old texts, the old emails–even looking at the old pictures and video clips–seems an exercise in torture. There is a turning of the stomach and a clenching of the heart, looking at words you once meant so much your whole body seemed to shake.

When I wrote my letters, emails and whatever, I meant them, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I don’t want to see them. The once explosive sentiments turned to be a cancer of some sort. I don’t want to go back to that part of my life, and the changes it had caused me. We were good at writing letters and I just hope that both of us have really meant what we wrote, word for word.

To be honest, reading words like these is so hard. It was something of an archaeological dig into a part of my life I’ve tried to bury for a long time now. Here it is–you cannot deny it, you were happy. I actually found it physically hard to keep reading some of the passages, it was unnerving to have to acknowledge how much my sentiments have truly changed.

These letters are evidences of my follies, or if not follies – they are precious reminders that no matter how good we feel about something in the moment–it could all be gone tomorrow. The me that wrote those letters had no idea what anguish you’ll put me through, but the me now can learn to appreciate the good things that occurred while it lasted.