3

I was packing and he was there.  He was helping me.  John George and I were getting married in a matter of weeks.  The top of my closet was filled with books.  I love books.  Books take me away to a place I would rather be.  There in the mist of CS Lewis and JK Rowling was my journal.  It was tan with cross-stitched flowers.  Lauren (my high school and college best friend) had given it to me for my twenty-first birthday.  In the front was an inscription about filling the pages with my adventures.  The pages had been filled, but not with adventures.  They were filled with sorrow from my break up with him, Mr. Valentine’s Day first kiss.

I held the journal up.  There was a trash bag in John George’s hands and a box of things to keep next to him.  I shrugged.  I remember it like I did I five minutes ago. I casually flipped through the journal.  I didn’t even stop long enough to read a single word of the tears and pain that were written in that book.  I tossed it in the black trash bag in my fiancé’s hands.  “Glad to be done with that. Glad to never feel that pain again.”

We packed my boxes and hugged and kissed.  Not passionately though.  Just routinely, the way some couples do out of habit.  All the while with the journal in the back of my mind.  The passion and tears that were in that book.

John George and I were perfect for each other.  If I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth then he grew up with an entire silver place setting in his.  His family actually had a silver service set that was buried during the Civil War to hide it from the Yankees.  The epitome of the old south.  Every thing my heart had ever desired.