Bonfire - IP

My mother and stepfather had built a life in a place called Gata, a quiet little village tucked into the mountains of Extremadura. The town was like something out of an old book, with narrow, cobbled streets that wound between little houses and orange trees. The hills were high and rough, dotted with scrub, and at the bottom of every dip you’d find a stream or a cattle trough, maybe an olive grove. It was worlds apart from suburban Coulsdon, Surrey, where I’d spent some of my own teenagehood and where my mother and stepfather had done their best to carve out a living before moving away.

In Gata, they’d gotten into hosting walking tours. A few nights in Paradores, full days of hiking, long discussions about Spanish history. Their guests were mostly British, hungry for stories. For a while, the walking tours kept them going, along with my stepfather’s occasional travel writing gigs. Then his heart began to give out. One operation, then another, and then, eventually, a transplant. They packed up, moved back to South London to be close to good hospitals. That was the end of the Spanish adventure.

My sister and I came to help them with the move. It was one of those days where you end up sifting through someone else’s life, handling their things—boxes of books, clothes, knickknacks. And then I came across something I didn’t expect to find. There was a box filled with my old drawings, stories, and little notes I’d written for my parents when I was a kid. All carefully kept, sorted, stashed away through every move and country change. She’d brought them along, house after house, as if there was something precious in each one.

I’d always thought of myself as a practical person. Sentiment seemed dangerous to me, a kind of trap. But here, looking through that box, I wasn’t so sure. I found myself caught in the middle of a very private debate—do I keep this stuff or not? I could feel the pressure of my mother’s care, and yet it was my carelessness I wanted to keep. Ownership was supposed to be a kind of prison. The trick was to stay unencumbered. That was the way, wasn’t it?

I knew my sister would have tried to save everything if she’d been around to see it. She’s younger, five years, and more sentimental. And anyway, living on a barge on Regent’s Canal with her husband and kids had forced her to be ruthless. She threw things away out of necessity, but not out of choice. So I made sure she wasn’t around when I got started, burning it all piece by piece.

Page by page, I tossed each drawing, each scrap of paper, into the fire. At first, I felt steady about it, almost satisfied. But after a while, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was erasing something that mattered, not to anyone else but maybe to me. It was a strange, hollow feeling, like stepping backward into a dark room. What was I really letting go of? I remembered Marty McFly, fading out of his own photograph, and wondered if that was what I’d been doing all along—scrubbing myself out in bits and pieces.

By the end of it, I felt lighter, but not better. Something had burned up with those pages, something I couldn’t quite name. It was the last thing I expected to feel, and I couldn’t shake it.