Why Burn pictures and letters?

To destroy memories and the signs …

To forget a bitter happening …

To hide it …

And maybe an excuse for a new beginning.

Divorce is not only separation of two souls, it is the cremation of a part of one’s life experiences. It is an attempt to forget and an effort to disremember. It is futility of hope and the demise of continuity. It is the end of foundation and bitterness to pleasantness. Recollections are always considered the first principal victim of this vicious “day of judgement”, a part of the mind that should be suppressed and not ever confronted unless it rears its head. Divorce is not expiry. Separation is not the end of continuity. It should not be unpleasant for one and all. But we can always wonder: How can one forget when the memory is still active? Ridding oneself of the “past muted traces” is perhaps the first and last means of discarding the unacceptable fragments in our memory. Photos, the most significant connections to our past, are always unburdened the earliest. Wedding photos are burned with the intention of not ever being seen, not acting as a reminder in any way, and not to be a flood of dreadful memories with every review. Photos of a failed marriage should be eliminated, so that the principal proof of failure of the smiling young couple in the photographs will never be a pretext for unreciprocated regret, a flower thrown on the coffin of lost opportunity and forgotten. We exhume the recollections of our failures and incapacitate passion.