As happens every time I move, I browsed through a couple of my old journals. I was once so meticulous, particularly when traveling. That six weeks in England ten years ago? I wrote every day, I wrote every detail and feeling. The colors of walls and carpets, the way someone's acne looked, the way tea with soymilk tasted.

What will I do with all of it? What is it worth? I know what it is worth -- it is how I learned to write.

I found my very earliest journal, started shortly after my fifteenth birthday. It is pretty much so embarrassing that I will never show it to anyone. Even if I became *~famous~* and published my diaries (ha), the stuff from high school will go into the fire.

So anyway, I have this pile of little books I've been carrying around for... almost twenty years? I haven't kept a steady handwritten journal since... gosh... 1998. Then I started blogging. I made a few failed attempts in the intervening years, always lasting only a few entries.

I ought to start again. To write something none of you lot will get to read. To give myself permission to be as self-absorbed and whiny as I need to be. That's all a journal is sometimes. A record of one's day, complete with all the TMI and secrets and processing.

My last journal volume, the one I kept throughout 1997 and into 1998 is actually the one that is the most readable. I was starting to mature. Only starting! heh. But it's filled with drama and romance and action and heartbreak and triumph and twists and turns. That was one HELL of a year. Maybe I'll type it out someday.

Tags: nostalgia, writing

Went through that box under the bed some more, ended up reading a couple other letters from other disappeared friends. Good ol Iain, who I wrote with for a couple years. I loved his letters a lot. He didn't even live very far away, in Modesto. But we only hung out twice. The distance, the waiting, it made the tension nearly unbearable, so when after a year we finally lay eyes on each other, I think I got one of the best hugs of my entire life. And that was only the beginning, WINK.

Anyhoo, I smiled and sat on the floor tonight, reading my old letters, my old pals, Robert and Steven and a few other people who found me through Hex and Punk Planet. Missing, as I said before, all letters from Neil, which are now dust in some landfill, but before they were sent there, I managed to faithfully type into a word doc, which I printed out and will now archive for another decade in a box.

Also spied an extra copy of my last issue of Hex, number 7, summer of 1997. I read it tonight and decided it was my very favorite of all of them, the best design and the best stories. All banged out on my Royal typer. A bit sad to read because when it went to print, I had just bought my plane ticket to London and awaited my fake destiny with a fake person. I was so excited, no idea what I was getting myself into. Idiot.

Finally found a letter from Heather, the girl in Leeds who saved my life, in a way. She is so sweet and kind and cheerful, writing from some windy winter day ten years in the past. I wonder where she is now, if she practices law somewhere or still plays in punk rock bands. In this letter she said she was sorry about what happened with Neil, but that she had known him for many years, and never figured out what was going on in his head. I wish I had kept up with her. But we lost touch. I have lost touch with a lot of people.

Letters, such lovely artifacts of another time, another world. My favorite part of each and every day was that walk to the post office to look in my little metal box. I collected my mail and couldn't even wait to get home, I read it on the steps. God, what a thrill! And now I check my email all day long and there is hardly ever anything there but spam.

Tags: nostalgia