kindling raze she threw all her journals in a metal drum with an open head. she sprayed them with lighter fluid, lit them up, and watched years of her life curl and turn to ash. at the same time she was torching everything in a paper-fuelled bonfire, i was thinking about destroying all the words she gave me. i wanted to print every email we ever sent each other and read them all one last time before burning them and erasing their digital footprints from my hard drive. i wanted to feel us die. i wanted to kill us twice. i moved her emails to the deleted folder in outlook express. i let them sit there so they'd know where they were going. i printed some of them. maybe a hundred. then i ran out of paper and forgot to print the rest. four years later, a power surge fried my desktop computer and i changed my mind. i didn't want to get rid of those emails anymore. the guy who was my computer tech back then came over to the house. i told him i needed him to save everything. the emails i'd left in limbo were what mattered most. he said he understood. he took the hard drive home with him. he brought it back the next day. everything was there except for the emails i asked him to save. my archived aim and icq conversations were gone too. it was like he targeted all the things i didn't have the guts to burn and incinerated them himself to save me the trouble. i asked him what happened. he just smiled. i asked if there was a way to get those lost emails back. he laughed and said no. he was wrong. or lying. i'm not sure which. outlook express gives you two weeks to retrieve a deleted message. but by the time i knew that, it was too late. he saved all the viagra spam. i guess that was more important than a bunch of emails from a real human being who thought she loved me once and didn't think i needed a bigger dick. i'll never know why he did that. he wiped out a part of my life i asked him to help me hold onto, and he thought it was funny. some of it's still there. but it only survived because there was a time when i wanted to destroy it. i wonder if she ever regretted it. watching everything she wrote flicker and fade like that. she used to talk about giving me one of her journals. she never did. i wish she had. then i could have given her back at least one small piece of who she was once, if she got curious enough to want to touch it again someday and ask herself how that was ever her. i couldn't do what she did. not now. i never kept a paper diary, but i don't think i could let go of any of the marks that tell me where i've been. i still mourn for everything i've lost. even the arguments and ugly moments i used to torture myself with twenty_years_ago. those were my moments. they belonged to me. last year i found some moments i didn't remember living through. they were in a flood-destroyed cardboard box in the basement. i filled five bulging red file folders with water-damaged gold. there were show flyers and handwritten letters i never sent. there were printed emails and self-directed missives. there were words and words and words and words and words. most of them were mine. some were from other people. people i loved. people i still love. words are everything. or at least they're some of the most important things. i didn't always believe that. i believe it now. and i know they'll never leave us. if we had to burn our notebooks to stay warm, we would still have all the verses in our stomachs to keep us fed. 220524 what's it to you? who go blather from