Return to Sender

Two years ago, I received this package in the mail. I've never opened it. Today, I decided to dig it out from the back of my closet and share it with you. Sort of.  You see, I still can't open it. I'm not supposed to.

Inside this envelope are three hundred sixty four pages of an ink-jet printed dream. This was the original draft of Before Ever After that I sent to myself right before I began querying agents.

A number of changes have happened since the time I mailed it. For starters, the book has a different title. Its beginning and ending have also been revised. Words have been added and words have been taken out. Some of these revisions were easy to make, while others required more effort. The biggest of these changes, however, aren't between the novel's covers – and I'm not talking about deleted scenes. More than any chapter of the book, I have changed the most. I'm two years and a lifetime older.

We usually can get a sense of a person's age by how they look. But wrinkles and white hair are not the only ways you can tell how old a person is. A more accurate way would be to discover how they hope. That's how I knew that I was no longer the same person who mailed herself the draft of her book. That girl packed more than a manuscript into that envelope. She also slipped in a carefully folded young hope, the fluffy kind that weighed no more than a birthday wish or a dandelion dream.

Life outside the envelope has been rather different. There's a lot more sun and it doesn't smell like mothballs. But along with fresh air, there is also rejection, disappointment and doubt. The hope in the envelope has been spared this. It remains oblivious and unblemished. I am not. I bear their bruises.

I hope differently from the person I was two years ago, but my hopes are exactly the same as the day I clicked the "send" button and sent my first query letter on its way. I continue to hope that Max and Shelley will find a happy corner of a small bookshelf to spend the rest of their lives. But I can no longer blow this hope into the wind like I used to. It feels heavier now. It sits in my gut and twists whenever a Google Alert about Before Ever After pops up in my inbox. And that's okay – because there is an envelope

nestled on top of a short stack of wishful thinking jeans

tucked in the back of a closet

that has kept a young old hope safe.

*  *  *  *  *

FLEETING MOMENT OF ODD INTROSPECTION – OVER.

CUE FUNNY PANDA PHOTO.

 

LINK LOVE: Sending out a HUGE THANK YOU to TANYA REIMER and the GOLDEN EAGLE for sharing their recent awards with me. Hope you guys can stop by their wonderful blogs and say hi