Today....

.. went much like every other day, recently.

It ended as I told you [my BFF] in a message: with my daughter sleeping peacefully in my bed.

In the interim, however...

I was packing my books into boxes. There is one - and only one - that will not fit into a standard "box pack" box. It is the illustrated history of the United States Navy. The book is leather-bound. It has always had a place, albeit at the bottom of a stack of irregulars, perhaps fronting my normal bookcase.

For some reason, I leafed through it. Perhaps because it was so unique. 

Within the first cover - it's hardbound - I found email after email between Shina and her then-lover Dan. Dan, the Second. 

Because I had stolen Shina from Dan, the First.

These emails exposed my most intimate emotions, raw. Yet... so long ago. It seems like a decade ago. Perhaps it was.

And still I read them. Well, at least the first couple pages.

I was nauseated, all over again. Not like the first time I discovered them, but I was sick nonetheless.

I remember placing them there, for safe-keeping, when I moved from our home  -Ours to just mine - to one of so much doubt. A friend's. One that would ultimately betray me, and send my father's service revolver to the smelt of the Baltimore Police Department.

I can remember the emotion I felt. Certainly the emotion I felt when I printed all those emails out and buried them in that book, for... I want to say "safe-keeping", but I'd be wildly inaccurate. Who wants to "safe-keep" the treasure of their world being torn asunder? Not me. But I needed something that would later remind me of the pain. Perhaps I was prescient, deciding unconsciously that the pain would eventually recede, but for whatever reason I needed to remember this. The facts, unadulterated.

Having made-up with Shina and since fallen-out again... for the "permanence", I was struck - upon discovering them yet again - by the insanity, the fruitlessness of keeping them still.

The book - it was bare before me. I hadn't even bore the time necessary to leaf through its expected appeal to my service. I perhaps have just assumed there would be a time when I wanted to document it. Perhaps share it with someone who has no idea.

It hasn't happened yet.

But what did happen is my re-discovery. I scanned the first few pages of this illicit romance and was unimpressed, if not sadly circumspect: "Neither of you children knew what the fuck you were doing." But I did.

I found myself yet again at a cross-roads: should I discard of this pack of printed-out email that I'd absconded with when I was burned, mortally? Or should I keep it, as a marker of some sort?

I kept it. I placed it all back within the leaf of my book - knowing that when next I consult it I'll be either near-death or certainly in another, truly fulfilling relationship - at which point I'll casually disregard it and see it burned in the trash.

Yet... a very profound part of me... doesn't believe in the "pre-life." I don't think it will ever leave me, so I have this compulsion to keep it near me -forever-, as I would evidence of God. My first and only touch - my first and only evidence -- that something truly was bigger than I.

So it remains on top of my bookcase, an orphan. The bookcase has been sold. All its neighbors have been boxed, but for this obstinate book. And this one ingratiating book remains... an orphan, again. Sitting there. Waiting for me to decide how I'll deal with its existence.

I like to think I can put it in a box - no matter how irregular - before I move. Before I say "goodbye!" to my current, convenient and comfortable life.  

But I don't know.

It is the talisman I do not know how to dispose of. It sits, and mocks me.

~Me