to-kill-a-rat

Some things are just so cleansing and refining that they must be done. One of which is to watch the pieces of an old sweatshirt, from an old boyfriend (or ex-husband), catch fire and burn until all that is left are ashes and a metal zipper. Call it a ritual, a ceremony or even voodoo-esk; but I prefer to call it a rite of passage. Pictures, letters, emails, flowers, sweatshirts, mix-tapes, or any other reminiscent objects are the little things that we indolently leave scattered in the bottom of our purses and closets; convenient little potholes which engulf those memoirs without actually getting rid of them, allowing us to create the illusion of closure. Getting rid of tokens from past heartaches is a way of empowering ourselves with the right to pass through and on to something better.

Watching them burn is my preferred method. At the moment when I am about to toss a memento into the fire I habitually hesitate, and that’s when the angel and devil appear on each shoulder. I become my own mediator, struggling to find a compromise between my head and my heart. But I love this sweatshirt. He looks so hot in this picture. I couldn’t possibly get rid of this letter. Luckily, this is just a speed bump, not a road block and I toss the objects into the fire; watching them be consumed by something more destructive than his words, more absolute than what is meant to be, and yes, something even hotter than him. I let it go. It’s the end of the road and I pass through.

A rite of passage is something more than change. “Change is the process by which the future invades our lives,”1. I envision a rite of passage as a tunnel between past and future. You enter in by way of a door at one end and exit through a door at the other; a sort of “breezeway” that enables me to keep out the cold air of the past, take off my coat and hat, then enter a warm and cozy room that is my future. Although change does take place in this little decompression tank, it is at my pace and my choosing. The future becomes something that I embrace rather than fear or foolishly try to avoid.

The latest episode of passage, for me, was Friday night. It is always good to pass through with your girlfriends, and ideally ones that need to do some burning of their own. After cutting all ties, deleting phone numbers and email addresses, and even venting some anger at the batting cages, we lit the fires of insurrection and bid farewell to the men, however mistakenly we called them such, who had wreaked havoc on our reality. Each sigh of relief did its part to put the fire out, and when the heat of the last embers dissipated we found ourselves transported beyond the reach of such fraudulent and feeble “men”. The morning after I surfaced as a better version of me and was reminded of a random quote I read somewhere, “Hating someone is like burning down your own house, just to kill a rat.”

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1. Alvin Toffler; Quoteland.com

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