VI

I was up far too late last night, first working and then reading through old diaries. I have a huge stack. I loved blank books and people used to give them to me all the time. A lot of them are fabric-covered lined books. Those were the gifts. But my favorite ones were artists’ sketchbooks with blue or black hardbound covers and heavy plain pages. I could write any direction I wanted to and could draw as well as write.

The diaries were more interesting to me than I would have expected, in part because I have no recollection of the things I wrote down. I mostly read through the end of high school and college and a little bit of early grad school. I found a half-finished novel I started when I was 21 and it wasn’t half bad in a chick litty kind of way. The material wasn’t innovative, but the voice was good and clear and amazingly not my own, although it was clearly based on my life and that of friends. I’m half-tempted to finish it. I found the diary entry on losing my virginity, which was notable mainly for the fact that I didn’t admit it was my first time EVEN IN MY OWN DIARY. In fact, I went to some length to hide that fact. I was that embarrassed about waiting so long (for at the time, I thought I was ancient). Funny how those things don’t matter at all in hindsight. Or, at least, not as much as you think when you’re young. I found, neatly typed and tucked between the pages of one diary, a poem I’d written to/about an ex as things were falling apart. It’s also not awful, but far too personal and specific to repeat in public (Apparently, I do have limits. Who knew?).

It’s not an entirely good thing to spend so much time in the company of your past. It left me nearly sleepless last night, lost in thought on all that had happened, reminded me of things that I had meant to do but have never, in fact, gotten around to accomplishing. Is it too late? Do I still want those things.

Mostly, though, I kept coming around to this question: if there had been blogs when I was in my teens and twenties, would I have written one? And also this question: What is gained or lost by moving the private into the public sphere? Reading from these artifacts, I am distracted by my handwriting, particularly as a teenager. I am constantly messing with, trying out different affectations. That would be lost in a blog. I am also much more confessional than I feel comfortable being here. Would those things simply be lost had I been blogging instead of writing back then? Or would I have been more of an exhibitionist? And then there’s the matter of things tucked into the books, fluttering to the floor at odd moments to surprise you. A Paris metro ticket. The receipt from the purchase of a phone card at the post office in Fontainebleau, France. The aforementioned poem. An unidentified phone number on the back of a cocktail napkin. The front of a matchbook from Brandy’s Piano Bar in New York. The carefully flattened wrapper of a sugar cube.

There is no artifact of the internet. It is both forever and never in the way these paper diaries will never be. There are things both gained and lost. While nuance and personal things are lost in blogging, gained is a reliability. Or, at least, that is something I’ve gained. Most of these books are half empty. Some more than half. It is rare, save for the couple of journals that were written for class assignments, for me to have written daily for more than a week or two. Yet here I am, just past my sixth anniversary of blogging an average of slightly over once a day (my first ever blog post was July 10, 2003). Six years. And a whole lot of words. I wonder where I’m going with this?