Manifesting

It's hard to ignore the instagram noise that gets so loud this time of year

all insisting about letting go and cutting cords and releasing the past

I think about Danielle who saw her wedding dress in a store window and bought it 

before she had a love she could count on. Manifesting, she called it

Two years later she threw the dress onto the fire pit 

under the invisible watch of a new moon - you know, more manifesting

I think of what I have to burn as if fire could scorch away feeling

The cardboard box you filled with relics of us and so unceremoniously 

dumped on my doorstep. I got it as far as my basement where its been silently

collecting dust the ghosts of us in a reluctant truce

You told me on that last day never to speak to you again and I thought

Where's the humanity in that?

I don't think I am made of fire or for the fire

I don't think I have what it takes to destroy or disappear

I want to open that box and set free every laugh and every tear and every I love you and watch them fly away like rehabilitated birds released back to the wild

I want to put that box in a deep hole at our favorite spot by the lake so one day years from now a tree will grow over our love letters because really every word was a seed so full of promise

I want to place every birthday card, every handcrafted offering, every silly doodle on an altar because our labor was sacred and deserves to be honored

Actually -

I would burn it all

every last piece of evidence 

if there was a way to melt it into glass

and hold it up as a mirror

for you to look at