That and he was the Devil

"What is all this?" She asked incredulously. I was shuffling through paper memories usually confined to a Rubbermaid container and stored in the darkness of the garage. That's just the only place left of all the photographs that came before we went digital, all the people who have no place in a current album, and everything anyone had ever put on paper and given me that didn't have it's own place in a binder. That and all Isabelle's baby pictures waiting to be scrapped.

Of all that crap, I knew she meant the letters, the business size envelopes bulging with poetry and drawings and tender musings tangled with legal documents and court orders. "Letters." I hoped that would be the end of that but knew better.

"Love letters? Who has this many love letters?" She laughed and I didn't say that this was just the ones from Him.

"They're not love letters! Well. Maybe if they were truth. They're more like grappling hooks."

"Why do you keep them?"

"….I don't know. They're a reminder that I can be easily fooled."

"Have you ever considered that maybe he did love you? Even if he was a really messed up person?" She asked as we stood over the pile.

"You must be joking." I stared at her and began shoving the letters with his prison number at the top of the return addresses back toward the bottom of the box. "No. How would I live with that?"

"I just mean, maybe it doesn't have to be one or the other. Maybe he loved you but he just couldn't get it together. Look at all these letters."

"Yes. I'm sure there are so many other things to do in prison. Look, he wrote exactly often enough to keep me from filing child abandonment. That's no accident. He could have just written where he was currently being incarcerated but he didn't, he wrote all this nonsense. That's exactly how fucked up he is."

"But you opened them. And you keep them."

"That's how fucked up I am."

"So if it doesn't work out, it never was?"

"Love isn't something you can write down and give to someone. It never was and that's why it didn't work out." I paused a few moments to check if I believed what I was saying. "That and he was the devil."

She laughed and from there it was easy enough to bury the letters again.