The Journals

Recently, someone asked me how I remember all that was going on during one of the most stressful times of my life. "Do you have journals?" Yes, I have journals. But I don't look at them. I have unfinished novels based on the illusion that was my life before April 2004, and I have unfinished novels based on everything that happened after. But the settings for these are mostly my mind, so I don't feel they will be of much interest to many people. And besides, I am a perfectionist as well as a procrastinator, which means I will never actually finish anything in life that I set out to do.

But to answer the original question, these memories are just burned into my being. I think things over and over, until they are bored into the files and vaults that have taken up shop in the twisty, winding tunnels of my memory. It is almost an obsession. Could I have done that differently? A better response would have been...blah blah blah. If I could take that one conversation and erase it, or make it better the outcome could have been so much different. Basically, I'm a freak. But I don't remember everything. No one can remember everything.

And so I blog about the things I do remember-- the things that stick out in my mind, the scenarios I have played over and over again on the front screen of my mind. The gaps? Well, the gaps are composed now of bits of feelings that I remember... a phrase here, a nostalgic glance here. I weave them together to get myself to recall the moment. There is some ad-libbing, but it is not fiction. The outcome of each and every instance is real. And there ARE the journals, which hold the real memories, vaulted away as soon as they came into being.

One day I decided to look in one of my journals, to see if I could conjour a new feeling, or a new understanding of a painful memory that was hiding just beneath the surface of my conscious awareness... but I couldn't force myself to finish reading it. I got physically ill going back to that place. The place I was in when I first wrote it. It was frantic, sprawling script that looked as if it belonged to a mad-woman. It did not have the bubbling half print, half cursive font most of my letters possess. In fact, I didn't recognize it at all, but of course it was mine.

I began to read the journal entry of this possessed mad-woman who had been me just three short years ago, and I began to sob and shake. This woman was so tortured and alone. She wrote of helplessness and depression. She wrote of wanting to be happy and at the same time not deserving it. I slammed the leather-bound book shut. It was too painful. It was too real. I would stick to writing about the things I was ready to deal with. I will not open the journals again, maybe forever. Maybe I will throw them in a fire and watch them burn. Maybe I will bury them until I am strong enough to confront the raw emotion attached to each and every page. Maybe I will begin a new chapter in a new journal and tell of all the things for which I am thankful each and every day. And maybe eventually, these chapters will cancel out the old.