Do you think that the paper dry cleaners use when they preserve your wedding dress is meant to serve  as lighter fluid?  Because it does!

I’ve been back and forth about what to do with that stupid dress.  I threw away the box a while ago, and the dress, in it’s plastic laundry bag, has been shoved onto a shelf in a room I rarely go in.

In what seems like destiny to me, my son and his friends recently built a shack with a fire pit in the woods behind my house, and I’ve been eyeing the fire pit, wondering if it would be disturbing to burn my dress in it.  It was not.

Which brings me back to my question:  Do dry cleaners put that tissue paper in on purpose, knowing it is the only thing that will get the fire hot enough for the dress to burn?  Without the tissue paper the dress was just melting, which felt like a pathetic representation of the way my marriage slipped away; it melted into a smoldering pool of emptiness.  That was not what I wanted.  I wanted a statement.

Here’s how it went, thanks to the lovely pink tissue  paper, added to ensure the dress kept its shape.

How spectacular is that?  In the end, all that was left was that one tiny flame, dying in  pile of ashes and partially melted beads.

Sort of sums it all up.  In the end, the same paper meant to preserve the story of that day, turned it into the truth.  One single flame, in a bed of ashes.