To Anyone Who’s Ever Written Me a Letter:

I’ve saved them. All of them. All these years. And I have to apologize to you because today, I threw them out.

There is a file box that is always in my possession that housed hundreds of letters and birthday and Easter and St. Patrick’s Day and Christmas and Thanksgiving cards. And birth announcements and newspaper clippings and random photos and calendars for God’s sake. I held on to all of these things for purely sentimental reasons. They are from family, friends, acquaintances, former co-workers and bosses, old boyfriends, old flings.

In the madness of my de-cluttering, I decided to let them go.

I just took me almost the entire length of Kyle’s nap to go through that box. I decided to continue saving certain priceless things – letters and cards from my grandparents, cards for Kyle, correspondence from Stewart (and for Stewart – I can’t decide for him what to throw away). I saved the random photos because those can go in the albums I will make someday when I tackle similarly the Great Photo Archiving Project of All Time. I saved printed emails that were just really well written. I saved the yearbook from my senior year of high school but I’m throwing away the first three.

Okay, so here’s a sampling of what I threw away:

All love letters from ex-boyfriends. I read once somewhere that you should keep old love letters and throw away old bills. That’s a very nice thought, but in the last year I have learned that doing so is a big mistake. Keep the old bills because you might get audited. Throw away the love letters because they’re embarrassing. Plus they take up much-needed storage space. They’re sweet, but they’re old and outdated. Like 18 years old.

A giant stack of birthday cards. Have I really had that many birthdays?

The obituary of my suicidal friend, which I wrote and submitted. I decided I will remember her and I don’t need her obituary making me sad. It’s taken several years but I’m not as mad at her as I was at first.

A giant stack of tortured poetry from my youth (and several rejection letters from The New Yorker!). And some journaling that was not kept in a journal. Honestly, if I got sick and Stewart had to handle my affairs and he found all this stuff while looking through my records, I’d really be mortified. (Side note, Stewart never goes through the officey stuff. He doesn’t even know what we have. Conversely, I have gone through every single piece of paper in this house, and I know all of his secrets. One time I found headgear in a little case – you know, the headgear that used to come with braces and make one look like a walking antenna? I was sort of horrified for him, but when I asked him about it, he told me that it was his old roommate’s. I believed him.)

My “acting” portfolio. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Four calendars and a pile of Franklin Planner pages from 1996. What on earth was I thinking keeping these things?

I’m going to put surveillance on our garbage and recycling cans until they’re picked up Sunday morning, so don’t even think about coming over to snag these things and blackmail me.