Instructions for Disposing of Your Past: Part I

You will need:

Your own secluded island (or bathtub, any place with water will do)
A fire pit
A bottle of your favourite wine
A full moon
Lhasa de Sala discography

The method:

Strip naked. Let the sun warm, and the wind tickle, your skin, untouched now for so long the pleasure of it is almost excruciating. Close your eyes. Remember how you came to be here. Remember all the happy years, the difficult days, the eternal seconds. Remember the lovers, eager and bashful seducers. Remember the teachers, pedantic or wise. Remember your friends when you needed them. Remember your enemies when you needed them too. Remember your suffering, remember your joy. Remember you have not had an easy life, remember it was not hard.

When you have remembered every abandoned dream, every punchline and plot, slip quietly into the waves and swim. You will remember how and the water will remember you. Let the water take your memories. Let them feed the fish.

As the sun begins to set carry the box with all of the important papers - the A+ essays, the copyright poems, the love letters, the hate letters, the mortgage and first draft divorce papers- outside. Take some papers- do not read them- from the box and lay them in the pit, then stack the kindling around them, then the wood around that. Turn up the Lhasa, pour a glass of wine, light the match to the papers and let your gaze follow the fingers of the fire pointing towards the full moon rising in the heavens.