Growing up I had several pen pals. A child with no television with parents who defined the term “over-protective”, I sought refuge in books and letters. Lots of letters. I kept lists of the people I was writing, detailed charts that kept track of who got the next letter… and for the most part, the world wrote back. Life lines to an existence I wanted and could dream about and did dream about. My dreams and my letters went uncensored.

Good thing, too. Some of those letters were steamy! Because eventually I ceased to be twelve and the recipients ceased to be other lonely little girls living in middle America wondering about exotic California and our sunshine. No, eventually my letter writing was directed at long-distance boyfriends. Full of loneliness and angst, I’m sure. And some of those letters I received told me stories about worlds I couldn’t imagine. I wish that I’d saved some of these letters… but with each ending I burned the volume of paper that witnessed to a romance best forgotten. Even I couldn’t miss the irony of lust burning, despite having only written experience with the subject. Perhaps they weren’t as provocative as they felt at the time, but I knew this much, it was best not to keep them lying around. If they shocked me, I’m sure my parents would have converted just to pack me off to the nearest convent had they read them.

I’d like to think that if I discovered letters of my teenage child, I would respect the privacy of young love. But growing up I had no assurance of such privacy. In fact, my experience told me just the opposite. I once had a tape recording (bootleg, oh my) of Elton John’s Too Low for Zero album that my brother liked to take without asking. We were teenagers, this is the stuff of being teenagers. Except I cherished that tape recording because it was made for me by the first man I ever truly loved. Imagine my absolute horror when I discovered that 10 seconds of the tape had been erased. Dead silence invades right in the middle of a song, and then the song picks up as if it hadn’t happened at all. My brother had misheard a word in the lyrics and reported the “swear word” to my father, who also misheard the lyric and without telling me erased the offending section of the tape. Then they waited and probably hoped that I wouldn’t notice.

But I did notice and I was outraged. Something sacred had been violated. Holy places require we take off our shoes. It’s a sign of respect. Yet in they had trampled with muddy shoes, no wiser for their actions—no need to remove the filth from their feet, they felt justified. No explanations, no apologies.

I had no recourse, other than to glare and suggest to them both that their behavior was appalling and disrespectful; and perhaps they should both consider being fitted for matching hearing aids since Elton clearly sings the word “Cell”. But inside, I was seething and angry and brokenhearted that this item I cherished had been violated.

And when I reflect back, I can honestly say as I held my mangled tape cassette in my hand and looked at my brother and father, I realized that they weren’t a part of my life. Something broke, something burned. They had breached a trust that they couldn’t understand. Ignorance really—neither of them had ever been or ever would be a teenage girl. What could they understand of how I felt? I stood there, shaking in my fury; wise enough not to tell them exactly what I thought of them and quietly resolving to booby-trap my world. No more getting in. They were banished. They may have been well-intentioned, I can’t speak to their motivations. But it was unforgivable. And since they weren’t offering up any apologies, it only made their banishment easier to enforce. I was the wounded, they the egregious.

Two things became very clear to me that day. The first was that my younger brother and my father had made their choice—they chose each other not me. Instead of directly speaking to me before they acted, they rallied behind their own sense of “right” and left me to suffer consequences that I hadn’t earned. It would have been easy to ask first, but neither of them felt any obligation to ask. I didn’t count enough for that; I was less than zero.

But, more importantly I made a decision to hold things that were sacred to me as close to my person as possible from that moment forward. Steamy letters of teenage love fell into that category—and they burned when I feared they might be the next item to be violated. It was easier to commit to memory the emotion they contained and let them go, than to risk letting anyone stumble into my private world. Holy ground needed to be protected and preserved… privacy was going to be the hill on which I took a stand. And boy did I rally; locks on my the doors to my room and my heart. I scooped up my belongings, feeble as they were, and allowed no one access. I cocooned behind my door, music blasting, and hibernated. And every once in awhile a ten second silence screamed the truth from the stereo speakers.

It’s never about one moment, although one moment often defines the future. Tipping points are reached gradually. We don’t explode or in my case, implode without cause. And what pushes us over the edge seems minor when taken on its own, out of context, without the backlog of wounds left untended to account for our reaction. But even those small moments have consequences… I’m still paying for them. So is my brother. And my father. That bit of tape that was erased, blew down the last tenuous bridge we had to each other. It was their choice to obliterate that bridge with their inconsiderate behaviour, but it was my choice not to rebuild it. Instead, I built other bridges to other people in letter after letter to world around me.

And I didn’t stop writing. My lists grew longer, my charts more complex; and the volume of response grew. Letters flew back and forth; the postage paid, ironically, by my father. The world outside came to me in envelopes… as guarded as I was, those letters let my world speak too. I built a bridge to a world beyond my own life—and while it wasn’t permanent, it held me over. Kept me sane and connected. And it promised a future that felt, well, promising.

When I met the consummate letter writer, I stopped burning letters. A rose colored envelope contained a bridge to the future I could actually cross. On rose colored paper he told me he loved me. And as my mailbox flooded with rose colored envelopes I found my way home, one letter at a time.