Blood and Wine

Black Box.

Do you have your own Black Box? A box where you keep all the mementos you just never had the heart to throw away? Mementos like farewell cards you saved to one day reopen in the future so you would never forget those people who once meant so much to you. Gifts and trinkets that never found their place in your life and still haven't, still waiting for the day when they do. A withered, brown rose petal that somehow found its way inside.

Mementos like love letters you saved.

Rereading an old love letter is almost surreal. Just picking it up and unfolding it -- there's a tremor in your hands just holding it. You find yourself blushing remembering how you once felt that was the most beautiful prose you'd ever read, and your face burns hotter when your thoughts naturally wander to the prose you yourself wove in reply. You suddenly discover a deep urge to bury your face in embarassment at the poetry you once composed -- poetry now apparent to you to be what they were: laughable and puerile. You just want to run away when you think of the things you'd said -- oh, how you'd promised the moon and the stars and all the candy bars in the world to her. To say you were majorly screwed-up back then would be an understatement.

But you can't help but find yourself smiling fondly at those memories, at how happy reading the words on that piece of paper once made you feel, covered with pink glitter and sweetly perfumed as it was -- there's still a hint of spiced honey on the ink somehow surviving to this day. You can't help but chuckle remembering the words you committed to your own letter, how happy they made her feel -- like it was the best prose she'd ever read in her life. You can almost feel again how she'd held you like she would never let go after you showed her poetry you'd spent nerve-wracking hours building, all the time worrying she would think it laughable and puerile. That warm feeling in your chest threatens to overwhelm you when your memories flicker to how she cried in your arms as you promised the moon and the stars and all the candy bars in the world to her.

And now you realize, that for all your hate of all the things she did and the things she was, for all your coldness when you told her you didn't feel anything for her anymore, and for all the pain she'd caused you and the pain you'd caused her, you realize that you finally miss her.

Now, looking back through the window of an old love letter at memories of days drifting further and further into the realms of the forgotten by days past and days to come, you start to wonder if those were indeed the right words to have said that day. You wonder if things might have turned out for the better if you'd just given her a chance and tried to love her again. You wonder if you'd still be together today, still writing love letters to each other and composing puerile, laughable poetry and arguing over who gets to promise that new planet thing Sedna they just found to the other.

You wonder indeed. And with one last whiff of spiced honey, you fold the letter, like the memories of that girl you once loved, back the way it's been folded for years and fondly return it to its rightful spot in that Black Box where it will always be for you to find again.
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