I love paper.

That’s a good love because I write on a lot of it. Even in this age where I can work on my cell phone, I prefer the pen (black or blue) and paper. I love the immediacy of putting pen to paper. I look at a blank sheet of paper (preferably with lines but I can work on blank stuff too), and I see possibility.

Through the years, I’ve written in notebooks and journals, on legal pads and post-it notes, around envelopes and folders. I don’t write on skin or fabric.

I now also write while typing into a keyboard. However, most of the time, I’m typing in something written down.

I also love doing rewrites on paper. I love crossing out and drawing arrows and making inserts and spreading several sheets on the table as I change around a section.

I have accumulated a lot of paper through the years. Even though my papers are organized in boxes, I felt like I was drowning in it, so this past holiday season, I did a huge paper toss.

Over the course of two nights, I hauled out the boxes and dove into two decades (I’m old) of paper. I swam through pages. Sometimes it was a script, sometimes a story, sometimes a love letter.

Sometimes, the pages were stiff from age and moisture. Sometimes, they were fragile from too much writing on them. Page by page, I kept or tossed, and my toss pile got larger and my recycling bin got fuller. 

It was time to let go. Let go, let go, let go.

It was time for the paper to go, get recycled, and become something else.

I kept the love letters though.