Past flames in the fire
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been trying to reunite an abandoned suitcase full of letters with its rightful owner. The suitcase was found on a street corner 20 years ago and has been drifting from custodian to custodian ever since. When it fell into my hands, I decided to track down the letter-writer. I eventually find her in Italy, a woman named Isabel. I send her a message through Facebook. And I wait. After two days, she gets back to me. “Hello,” her response reads, “I do not want the letters. They’re a part of my history and in history they stay. Life goes on. I have a life. Hope you understand.”
Isabel has a life. Everyone has a life. Except for one person who’s stuck with an old suitcase full of letters written in a language he doesn’t even understand. It’s as though an inhabitant from the lost city of Pompeii was brought back to life, and the archeologists handed her back her bowls and mallets only to hear her say, “nah, I’m good.” And so, in disbelief, I reach out to Isabel once more.
“For me,” I write, “the most interesting thing about revisiting the past, isn’t to find out the ways I’ve changed, but rather to discover the ways in which I’m still the same person. I look to the past to find a trace of the soul, perhaps.”
“I take from the past the lesson it offers and move on,” Isabel writes back. “That makes the soul grow. I don’t have even one letter from anyone in my past. I learned and moved on. Since you’re antithetical to my way of being,” she continues, “I leave you the challenge of discarding the letters. Who knows, maybe it will help you in some aspects of your own life.”
After his death in 1924, Franz Kafka left behind a will instructing Max Brod to burn his remaining writing – the unfinished novels, the journals, the letters. But he never did. Brod’s reasoning was that if Kafka really wanted his stuff destroyed, he never would have tasked Brod with the job.
I am not Max Brod and Isabel is not Kafka. But still, she can’t possibly think I’m up for the job. There’s so much personal history contained in her envelopes that I can’t imagine performing the act of destruction she is asking for.
But destroy I must. I’ll need to work up to it, though, shadow box before getting into the ring for the main event. And so I decide to start by deleting some emails. In my junk folder. I’ll see how that feels and take it from there.