This week I went to my parents’ house to pack up my old room. They are moving to Devon. My mum didn’t want me to throw away the cardboard vase I’d made when I was five or six, with a picture of Athena on one side, and the title
Athen
– a
(because I ran out of space). She took it from me, she obviously unsure as to whether to throw it away herself. I think she wanted to keep it but was embarrassed at being sentimental.
I ate scrambled eggs and cold mushrooms.
Opening old, broken drawers I flung sheet after sheet of my doodles and poems and songs into binbags. I came across a cache of loveletters a girl had written to me. I didn't know her all that well at the time. She was away, in Poland, and she wrote a letter to me everyday. Like a diary. She gave them to me all at once, in a package. I remember being surprised. I don’t think I ever really understood that they were loveletters. I know I didn’t read them all in one go.
I was listening to an audiobook of a Hemingway novel that I'd recently read as I put the letters on a pile to be thrown away. It occurred to me that this Hemingway novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, was about someone who was unable to truly understand that they were loved. You should never disregard being loved. I must never forget that, I was loved. I did not throw away the letters. I wonder where I shall keep them.
