Here is my first post, which has been a long time coming.
I have been so busy with school work and work that I really have not made the time to blog, thus breaking my hope of beginning to blog once more. I really used to love to blog and kept one up when I had a myspace page in 2006ish. Even though I have not posted anything, I have been busy.
In December, after the fall semester ended, we had a potluck at work and got to enter our name to win a door prize. The bigger story is that we got a sheet with a brainteaser and were supposed to solve the puzzle and then write our name on it and throw it into the pot. I did not solve the brainteaser, which was a suduko puzzle, but I slipped my name in the drawing anyway. My name was drawn and I became the owner of a leather journal.
I had always wanted to buy one, when I was an avid journal writer, but I was always broke and never really felt the need to have one enough. Then poof, my name was called and there was this Holy Grail. This I have been writing in on and off since January.
From age sixteen to about twenty-two or three, I kept a journal. I even had volume numbers on the sides so that I could keep them in order. But then after awhile, when I would reread things I wrote, I did not like a lot of it. There was negativity from past relationships, deaths, and changes that were out of my hands. It depressed me to read. So I decided that I would just trash them. Out there, in some landfill, is a treasure trove of journals waiting to be unearthed. Hopefully an archeologist, or even an average person, will find them and get a thrill.
One afternoon in a local thrift store, I found my thrill. It was a new place that had opened up about three months prior and it was like a giant rummage sale. There was slight order, but not enough to be official. In one small room, there were a few bookshelves with book piles. There was not enough to be intimidating, so me and my sister sat and began to go through them shelf by shelf. On one there was a pile of composition books.
I haphazardly began to flip through one and discovered it was written in. There were poems scattered through with half written letters. It fascinated me. I do not know the person who used the book, but their life immediately drove me to sit and read through everything. From what I could infer, the girl had taken meth and was trying to stay clean, she was going through a break up, her brother had died, and she liked to get high. This brief summary communicates none of the emotion that her written words evoked.
What I cannot relay are the slight changes in her handwriting based on the subject matter, the crossed out words that were lost from her poem drafts, letters to people that were never sent but where her words trailed off, pages that were torn out or pieces of paper torn off, the flow of words as she tried to find rhyme, or the varying number of pages skipped between compositions. She gave that book life. She gave it character. While I will probably never know who she is, she has become this book to me. Between the pages is life.
This is when my mindset began to change. While I do not regret my decision of throwing my journals away, I wonder what will happen if I begin my journal collection anew. If my marriage falls apart, or I experience great hardship that I would rather forget, would I need to purge myself of those first-hand accounts? Or will I leave them, and perhaps keep them in hopes that one day I will face that period of my life with strength?
There are some things that I know were in those trashed journals that I miss, that I would love to read or see again. There is no undoing that can be done, so now a fresh start begins. I will try. Right now my brain is debating so many things, over and over, it seems that there is no clear direction to head into. But that is fine; I have a week or so yet before some final decisions have to be made.
That is the one major flaw I feel could be ironed out.
I pull myself in every direction, debate every side in my head, weigh the pros and cons, completely and entirely knot myself in a hug tangle before making a solid decision. Usually this decision is made right up to a deadline; I cannot help but to cut it close because I really do want to be as sure as I can. And when the decision is made, I am never sure but it is far too late to change it. It is nice at this point to know I have to stick with whatever choice I made. Here the pressure begins to dissipate.
“Reservation Nights” is my current long-term project, more about that later. It is nearly three a.m. and I work at eight. My cat PeeWee is curled up on my lap wanting us to head to bed.
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