Every time this is read, whether out loud or in your head remember that yesterday is dead.

Hello my name is today and this is my virtual pen letter to all the delicate hearts that have preserved their pasts in the fridge called life.

Like food gone unchecked your ‘yesterday’ rots and then reeks, before eventually its odour chokes the life out of the remaining produce. You then open your fridge to find it stinks because you were too hesitant in throwing away what has now contaminated the content of your fridge. You insisted that in time you would go and let the moulding food go but each time you took those steps you decided to hold on to it for a  little while longer. In time the food lost its taste and to prove this it circulated a bitter stench, yet every time you journeyed back to your fridge you couldn’t stammer the courage to open up and let it go.

I could apologise for the graphic image but I won’t because I want each of you to envisage how choking your past can become when we make room for it in our fridge. We do not treat our pasts as rubbish that ought to be disposed of; rather we treat it as we do left-overs.  We subconsciously create space in our fridges for our pasts, concealing it as left overs, thus giving it grace to carry – over into our ‘tomorrow’.

You return to open your fridge and the stench hits you. It becomes so overwhelming that in your disgust you throw away what was originally fresh produce. You are struggling to throw it all away and so the odour lingers, making your skin crawl. The smell stays on your skin, your hair and your clothes. You carry on throwing the contents of your fridge away, everything from your most recent groceries to the week old bread, until you finally find the source of your pain. You stare at your pain. You stare at your past and you finally overcome the temptation to put it back. You have let it go.

Everything has now gone. Everything that you once harboured in your fridge has gone. It took you a while but you did it.

When we fail to let go of our past, our lives become a replay of that scene. When we handle the past with too much care as opposed to confronting it and throwing it away, it starts to attach itself to our future without our permission. Without our permission it will appear whenever it chooses and then will pose as a detriment to our future and each time it appears without our permission and we fail to confront it, its presence is strengthened and each time that happens it becomes harder to let go.

So I ask you, when was the last time you cleaned your fridge?

You cannot keep preserving food that has already decayed. Your past has perished already, it is time to throw it away.

This is the emancipation of you.

Cris x