Five letters.
That's how many it's taken for me to finally write with clarity and honesty. It usually takes me two though sometimes I can do it in one.

This is a practice that I started in middle school. It gives my anger something to chew on. When it's done digesting, I can usually tell the difference between want and need, hurt and damage, idealistic hope and a possible future. When my anger is done eating, I am left with only bones.

I wrote every time our stepdad moved out, every time dad chose his girlfriend or his selfishness over us, and every time someone judged our family without seeing what binds us together. We were a family always splintering apart, but we held together on the strength of our will and our love.

We are still a family and we are still splintering. The pressure and the blows come from different sources now, but the threat is always the same. Oblivion. And I've written about it all, knowing that my anger could either destroy us all or else help me find the materials with which to build.

I've written and written. I've burned and burned. Writing meant that I had to remember. Writing also meant that I could disappear enough to see the other perspective. I was angry. For the way things could have been or should have been. For the hurt that I wasn't sure would ever heal. For the adult sized problems we faced as children. Writing connected my anger to so much fuel, I'm surprised my skin didn't glow with it's fire. But that anger also kept hope alive and in a way kept me sane which is to say, safe.

I've gotten good at it. Writing, burning, refining. The goal is always "if I can help this person understand only one thing, what will the one thing be?" Writing, burning, refining. Remembering and reliving until what is left is trustworthy enough to build with. I didn't want to be a fire, the blaze that people shrink back from. I wanted to be a bridge. I wanted to make the adults in our lives understand each other. I wanted us all to meet in the middle even if the middle had to be carried on my shoulders, even if the whole family had to be carried on my back. That was when I thought people needed saving and I could save them.

I still want to be a bridge. But I am still, and perhaps only, a fire. Try as I might, I still burn. I've burned through 5 letters trying to see through my selfishness into what is true, trying to see through my hopeful gluttony into what is necessary and useful. And I think it's ironic that the fire you're afraid of is the only tool I have to build a road home.

When I write to you next and the page smells like smoke and the embers singe your finger tips, remember that it consumed me no less than 5 times. Five times, I went up in flames trying to find what was worth saving from the blaze. Five times, I sat raw, uncomfortable, vulnerable. Again and again, I was forced to admit that I was not done yet. I was still angry which meant that I hadn't let all of the hurt in yet, hadn't greeted it by its proper name. The bones were still obscured. If I tried to build a bridge with what I had then, we would drown in the river after the bridge broke.

It's tempting to make the mighty, tragic phoenix my metaphor. That's glamorous but that isn't honest. Instead of the triumphant phoenix, my heart is a beloved house that I burn to find the hidden treasure. Five times, I've burned my own house down. It doesn't get any easier with practice. What I'm trying to say is that our family has always meant more to me than the heart I lose and the blisters I gain when I ask my anger to teach me what is important. So I burn and burn through five letters, hopefully through your silence and into a future that we can build together.

This is the sixth letter and the epilogue. I know this because the fire has finally left and only my bones are left.