I would burn my poetry journals and watch the burning pages peel off one another in layers, the flames spitting little gray flakes into the air. As my ashen words swirled into the heavens, it pleased me to know that my inner self was once again safe: a team of the FBI’s best forensic scientists couldn’t put my emotions back together again. The beauty of keeping my truest emotions hidden in my writing was that I could incinerate them at a moment’s notice.
