Things That Don’t Belong in My Last Chapter
I’m feeling a strange mix of emotions tonight.
I thought about waiting for them to pass. Instead, I’m writing through them.
Today, more books were packed for their trip to the public library. Along with them went almost-new notebooks, magazines, compilations I once carefully created about religion and history, and countless other things I apparently believed I needed to keep.
Another area of my home is empty now.
Two bins. A three-drawer chest. My old jewelry-making craft chest.
Empty.
And then there were the pages.
More than a thousand of them.
Poems. Letters. Essays. Thoughts. Things written in desperation, hope, anger, loneliness and love—or what I believed was love at the time.
I shredded them.
All of them.
Watching those pages disappear, I remembered how much work it had taken to preserve them in the first place.
Years ago, I went through the trouble of getting all that writing off an old iPhone and printing it. It took months to gather everything because I had convinced myself there was a book inside those pages.
Maybe there was.
I imagined salvaging all that pain and turning it into something meaningful. Poetry, prose, essays, fragments of a life. I even packed two large boxes and sent them all the way to California to someone who repeatedly promised to help me choose the pieces worth keeping.
That never happened.
Today, standing beside bags filled with shredded paper, I wondered for a moment if my dream of having a book in the world had died.
Or worse:
Had I just killed it myself?
Then I realized something.
Maybe the book was never supposed to be an archive of everything that hurt me.
Before the paper came the digital purge.
Forty thousand entries disappeared from my phone.
Seven years of writing into the void.
Then came the printed pages.
And now they are gone too.
I have mixed emotions about that.
But not one drop of regret.
Because those pages belonged to a chapter I had been refusing to close for more than twelve years.
For five of those years, I believed in an illusion.
Then came seven years of absence.
And eventually, unexpectedly, he came back.
For one brief moment, I thought perhaps life was returning something to me.
Maybe people really do change.
Maybe time had accomplished what pain couldn’t.
Maybe this was why the story had never felt completely finished.
But sometimes life doesn’t return someone because you’re supposed to begin again.
Sometimes it brings them back so you can finally understand why you had to leave.
He hadn’t changed.
If anything, he had become worse.
And this time I understood the message.
Loud and clear.
I think hope is one of the reasons we have such difficulty letting people go.
We tell ourselves we’re remembering.
We tell ourselves we’re sentimental.
We tell ourselves those photographs, letters, messages and little objects are simply pieces of our history.
Sometimes they are.
But sometimes we’re keeping them because somewhere, buried beneath everything we claim to have accepted, there is still a tiny possibility we’re unwilling to bury.
Maybe.
Maybe they’ll change.
Maybe they’ll understand.
Maybe they’ll come back.
Maybe one day everything that happened will finally make sense.
Hope can keep us alive.
But hope can also keep a door open long after we should have closed it.
It has been almost four years since I stopped caring about that relationship. And yet I still had the photographs. I still had those thousand pages written during and after those years. Until recently, I still had tens of thousands of messages.
Why?
Perhaps because throwing away the evidence felt dangerously close to saying none of it mattered.
But that’s not true.
Something doesn’t have to remain in your possession to have been part of your life.
And destroying the evidence doesn’t destroy the person you were when you lived it.
She existed.
She hoped.
She waited.
She believed.
She hurt.
She survived.
I don’t need a thousand pages in a drawer to prove it.
For years, I used to tell myself that whatever else happened, at least I knew what love was.
I had lived it.
I had felt it.
Now I’m not so sure.
I’d rather believe love is something different.
Something magical, perhaps.
Something that takes your breath away without suffocating you.
Something that doesn’t require you to abandon pieces of yourself just to keep it alive.
Maybe one day I’ll know.
Maybe I won’t.
But I no longer need to rename pain as love simply because I invested years of my life in it.
There is a strange accounting that happens as we get older.
We begin looking around at everything we’ve accumulated—not only possessions, but identities, relationships, disappointments, obligations, old versions of ourselves—and asking a question we rarely asked when we were younger:
Do I really want to carry this any farther?
Lately, I’ve been asking that question about almost everything.
The books are going.
The clothes are going.
The old car is gone.
The photographs are disappearing.
Drawers are empty.
Shelves are becoming lighter.
Thousands upon thousands of words have vanished with the touch of a button or the teeth of a shredder.
From the outside, perhaps it looks like I’m simply getting rid of things.
I’m not.
I’m deciding what belongs in the life I still have left.
There comes a point when we have to stop treating our lives as though the important chapters are all behind us.
They aren’t.
Some chapters were beautiful.
Some were devastating.
Some lasted far longer than they deserved to.
Some people were only supposed to occupy ten pages, and somehow we gave them a hundred.
But the existence of those chapters does not mean we have to spend the rest of the book rereading them.
A life has to continue too.
And mine is continuing.
That may be what all this empty space is really about.
Not death.
Not erasure.
Not pretending the past didn’t happen.
Room.
Room for places I haven’t seen.
Room for words I haven’t written.
Room for people I haven’t met.
Room for mornings I haven’t awakened to yet.
Room for whatever version of me is still waiting somewhere ahead.
I don’t know exactly what my last chapter will contain.
I only know what I don’t want to drag into it.
I cannot delete the past from my brain.
I cannot recover the years I gave away.
And I cannot rewrite chapters that have already been lived.
But I can turn the page.
I can leave behind what has finished.
And I can stop giving the past storage space in my future.
There are still blank pages ahead of me.
This time, I intend to leave enough room to write on them.
