"Writing is both mask and unveiling." -E.B. White

One of my biggest regrets in life took place my junior year in high school...

Allow me to set the scene. I'm 16 years old and my very first real boyfriend has just dumped me. I emphasize the word real because public school kids have "boyfriends" or "girlfriends" as early on as kindergarten. It's just something you do; albeit, you never talk to them, touch them or make direct eye contact, but they belong to you. And the WHOLE school district knows it. The joys of growing up in a small town...

But I digress...

I'm 16 years old and my boyfriend has just dumped me. The pain is fresh and all consuming. I have yet to greet the age in which I possess the ability to put on a brave face and smile despite the pain --something one usually does not perfect until they are an adult. Adults are experts at producing the fake smile, the polite nod, the casual shoulder shrug that convinces others they are not broken, numb, clinging to the edge of themselves weak and uncertain how much longer they can hold on. No, my pain was worn on my sleeve. I cried openly, refused to eat, and indulged my sufferings with gloomy tunes and not so happily-ever-after romances. I feed the pain. In some way it made me feel more alive, as if until that very moment I had yet to live. 

During this time, I wrote a lot. 

As long as I can remember I've kept two journals. A personal diary and a writer's journal. In the first I wrote daily, detailed accounts chronicling the events in my life. Dear Diary, today was the school pep rally. I was allowed to wear my cheerleading uniform to class. I wish I could wear it everyday. It makes me feel pretty and popular. You know, stuff like that. In the second one, I wrote fiction.  In that notebook my best friends came to life. To you they'd be imperfectly developed characters, but I knew better, ever then, I knew they were bits and pieces of my soul. Taking on new life in the form of narrative.

In this season of my life, the characters that filled the page were lonely, sad, angry, and tormented. They understood me, so I clung desperately to each of them.

Let's fast forward a few months. As with most high school heartaches, mine soon passed. I no longer felt sad. Life had returned to normal. One day, in the dead of winter, I picked up my diary and thumbed through a few of the entries detailing the breakup aftermath. My face flushed with embarrassment. I felt ashamed of my emotions, thoughts and candid writing during that time. I quickly pulled my writing journal out from between the mattress and box springs and thumped through those pages as well. I no longer recognized the characters, who just a few months earlier, where my greatest comfort. Now, they seemed so unlike me, so sad. In that moment, I was ashamed of each and everyone of them. Ashamed of the words on the page that I had penned. Ashamed of myself. My only concern was that some how I needed to destroy the evidence that those emotion, words, and characters ever existed. I quickly ran downstairs towards the wood burning stove with the two journals in my hand. I paused for only a second --one thoughtless second-- and then opened the furnace door and threw both of the journals into the blazing fire. I sat there for probably less than a minute and watched the pages bend, crackle, burn, and quickly turn into ash. I closed the door and went back to my room without a single glance behind me. 

I wish I still had those journals. Those pieces of my soul. Proof that the emotion was felt, that the moment was lived, and that I flourished in spite of it, or maybe, because of it.