A version of this essay was originally published online on January 4, 2024.
Allow me to set the scene. It’s the morning after I hooked up with a sort-of-ex who destroyed me emotionally a few months ago, because I always like to touch a hot stove at least two or three times to make sure it’s still a bad idea. We’re eating BECs on everything bagels in his no-frills boy kitchen, just like old times, when I gesture toward a suspiciously blank spot on his fridge that kind of makes my stomach drop and say, “Did you throw out the birthday card I got you?”
“Yeah. I feel like holding onto that stuff makes you live in the past,” he says, like someone who wasn’t literally just inside of his ex-something-or-other less than an hour ago.
“Oh,” I say, exactly like someone who still has a Ziploc baggie of pretzels he once packed for me to take on the Amtrak sitting in a drawer back at my apartment.
Clearly, this man and I have very different ideas about what to do with the relationship rubble that’s left over after a love story comes to an end—the gifts, trinkets, and other bits of physical evidence that what’s over now did, in fact, happen. I still have letters, jewelry, sweatshirts, and yes, stale pretzels from long-lost lovers I’ve long since gotten over.
I’m not living in the past, I think to myself, the accusation prickling beneath my skin. It’s just that the past is alive whether you like it or not, sitting across from you at your kitchen table and taking up residence in these emotionally charged artifacts—the physical relics that remain after the numbers have been blocked and the memories start to fade—and I can’t bring myself to snuff it out.
I don’t know how anyone can. I don’t know why anyone would want to.
“Keep your old love letters; throw away your old bank statements” is among the advice writer Mary Schmidt dispensed to an imagined class of 1997 in a column for the Chicago Tribune, better known as the Baz Lurhmann number “Wear Sunscreen” that adapted and ultimately eclipsed it.
In a wry headline that helmed the original column, Schmidt remarked that the following advice was, “like youth, probably just wasted on the young.”
I’ve surely squandered plenty of youth and wisdom in my day, but she didn’t have to tell me twice about the love letters.
In a drawer in my childhood bedroom, you’ll find a graveyard—or treasure trove, depending on how you look at it—of once-enchanted, now-haunted objects: A purple jar candle a high school boyfriend once picked up for me at a roadside shop and the black V-neck t-shirt I was wearing in the backseat of his car when I gave him my virginity and he gave me my first real smack upside the heart; the bracelet a college ex presented, unwrapped, as a Christmas gift even though I knew we were about to break up for the second and final time and I kind of wished he’d given me nothing at all (I was single by the new year); two pieces of paper with his boy-scrawl handwriting, crumpled up and torn in half but never actually thrown away.
In a Midtown bar a few weeks before The Birthday Card Incident and mere days after the initial heartbreak that precipitated it, I asked yet another ghost of situationships past whether he still has the only gift I ever gave him: a pig-shaped corkscrew I’d been unable to stop myself from buying for him at a bookstore in Brooklyn five years ago despite my terror of seeming too eager or interested or absolutely beside myself in love with him because I was all of those things.
“Of course I do!” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I thought you were just going to ask if I still like pigs.”
I smiled quietly and blushed down at my drink, not mentioning the uneaten box of chocolates I still have sitting on my dresser—the only thing he ever gave me.
I lost a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five to an ex-boyfriend in college—by which I mean I scrawled a love letter beside the title page and gave it to him as a parting gift.
In case you missed that one in AP Lit, allow me to refresh your memory. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a book about the WWII bombing of Dresden and also aliens. Tralfamadorians, to be specific. And the most important thing protagonist Billy Pilgrim learns during his visit to Tralfamador is, per the novel, “that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” For the Tralfamadorians, time isn’t linear: “It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
Back in my ex-situationship’s kitchen with the birthday-card-less fridge, I want to explain all of this to him—about the Tralfamadorians and non-linear time and how people don’t simply vanish from your life just because you’ve stopped loving them or they’ve stopped loving you or you still love each other but, as he said to me on his couch the night before, “sometimes love isn’t enough.” About how you can’t just throw people and what they’ve meant to you away, even if you want to. About how I’m not living in the past; the past is alive in me.
But I don’t tell him about any of this. I don’t say, “Actually, these fictional aliens invented by a traumatized WWII veteran mean that you still love me—admit it!” Instead, I eat my egg sandwich. I fidget with a drawer in the side of his kitchen table. I laugh it off. I don’t say much of anything.
One of the universal laws of relationships holds that the person who cares less feels less, loves less—the one who tosses the birthday card in the trash while the other one’s crying over stale pretzels—is the one in possession of power.
I’m certainly in no position to dispute that.
But be that as it may, I think I’d still rather be the one holding onto the old love letters than the one holding all the cards. I’d rather be the one living in the past than the one trying to erase it. I think I’d rather live and die in the past than throw it away.
