Those Treasured Relics

I'm going to be up a creek without a paddle when I get married. Why? Because I have a tendency to keep relics of my former romances. April has frequently given me grief over the fact that when she and I found a long brown hair in my copy of "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy", I kept it in there, knowing that it originally belonged to a girl I'd dated in high school. I save special chat logs, and E-Mails. I have a bandana that reminds me of The Mirror. Although I had earned a second package from F3, that she'd stalled on sending since about July, I'll continue to treasure the one package she managed to send me.

In my continuing series of photographs that I've taken over the course of my various travels, this is a photo I took of the Flavian Amphitheater in Roma, better known to most as the Colosseum. I took it on my way to The Drunken Ship. When a Roman historian to sees the Flavian Amphitheater, it's somewhat depressing; at least, it was for me. This was one of the greatest engineering and construction marvels in the history of the Western world. When it was completed, it was a magnificent marble masterpiece (sorry about that, I was channeling Jesse Jackson); it was a center of Roman commerce, justice, culture, and entertainment. It was the venue of the egotistical combats of Commodus, and the heroic death of Saint Telemachus. It was the single most recognizable symbol of history's greatest empire.

And then the party was over. It was a slow decline, to be sure; it started with poor decisions by an emperor, and attacks by barbarians. Eventually, though, the empire was a whisper, and a painful memory of what the world was, and what it should have been. The glory of Rome was gone; all that remained were decaying buildings like the Flavian Amphitheater to remind us of that former greatness.

My relics of F3 are nowhere near as impressive as the decaying bricks of the Colosseum, robbed of their former splendor by vandals. To me, though, they are every bit as precious; they are a reminder of memories and emotions of someone who I will continue to treasure, even though the glory of those former days has passed. They're tokens of something precious that has been lost. Just as the sight of those relics of Rome cause us to treasure Rome's contributions to our own time, and value the great elements of our own civilization, my relics and memories of F3 will remind me of how amazing our time together was, and they will cause me to assign that much greater value when I eventually find the woman that I choose to spend my life with.