~ ~ ~
I revised my diary during the day, days later, and sometimes years later, with absolute certainty I never wanted anyone to read it.
Everyone I’ve told finds the idea of my revisions perverse, but if I didn’t get things down right, the diary would have been a piece of waste instead of an authentic record of my life. I wrote it to stand for me utterly. ♦
~ ~ ~
What if I narrate the same memories aloud each night in the same words? What if the memories degrade a bit more each night anyway? What if the recitation becomes rote but functionally useless?
Because I can’t reliably answer that question, for twenty years, every day, I wrote down what happened. After I finish writing this sentence I’ll do it again.
I’ll open the document, scroll down to the end, think to myself that I should write a macro to open the document at the end (which is never the end) instead of the beginning, then look at the keyboard. Then I’ll type the date in numerals and points. Underneath, I’ll type something in words. Then I’ll close the file. I’ll reopen it at least once on most days. ♦
~ ~ ~
I often prefer writers’ diaries to their work written intentionally for publication. It’s as if I want the information without the obstacles of style or form. But of course all writing possesses style and form, and in good writing they aren’t obstacles.
Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect. ♦
~ ~ ~
The first time anyone else read the diary was 1992. On the day I moved into my freshman college dormitory, I reached into the big box of sweaters and diaries and found … sweaters.
We didn’t think you’d be needing those, said my father. My two new roommates and their parents were there. I didn’t say anything. At that time, my diary was mostly about hating my mother. ♦
~ ~ ~
Two years later, I lent my laptop to my boyfriend, who needed to write five papers in one night, and in the morning, he returned the computer with a little Word icon right in the middle of my otherwise empty desktop. Please Read Me, Sarah, he’d called it. The document began: I just read your diary. All 75 pages of it … I don’t remember how it went other than that he not only failed to apologize but represented the act as a gesture of compassion, since I so clearly needed his expert help in evolving into a better person.
He’d just learned, among other things, that I could barely feel him inside me. ♦
~ ~ ~
After college, I lived in an apartment with four roommates, one of whom I sometimes curled up and slept with. One morning I saw he’d opened the document along with all the letters I’d ever written him; his name was in the file names. After an initial denial he admitted he’d opened the files but, in a fit of remorse, closed them before reading them.
I could have protected the document with a password or padlocked or hidden the computer, but I didn’t care enough to inconvenience myself. The diary wasn’t a trove of secrets; it was, simply, everything. I might as well have hidden myself from view. I still don’t care whether anyone reads it. ♦
~ ~ ~
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, I read the diary from beginning to end. Finding nothing of consequence in 1996, I threw the year away.
I’d already shredded the volumes I wrote in high school — not to keep them from others but to keep them from myself. So it seems I didn’t want to remember everything.
I wanted to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was. ♦
~ ~ ~
A few years after I threw 1996 away, another friend asked if he could try to hypnotize me.
He wanted to know why I was still thinking about someone I’d gone to bed with just once, months earlier, and barely seen again.
So did I. I lay down.
My friend swung a pendant from a string above my face, then asked me to close my eyes.
Why won’t you give up this imaginary problem?
The answer, suddenly accessible to me for the first time, surprised me: Because I don’t want to.
I wrote it in the diary. ♦
~ ~ ~
I don’t remember the chronology of those I embraced past the first five. I’d have to consult the diary.
I kept seeking and finding the exquisite moment. By the eighth, I’d already be seeking the ninth and tenth.
Around the thirteenth, it finally got to me. Finally, even I had to notice I’d become intolerant of waiting. My forward momentum barely stopped for the length of the touch.
I thought my momentum led to the next person, but in fact it only led away from the last person.
My behavior was an attempt to stop time before it swept me up. It was an attempt to stay safe, free to detach before life and time became too intertwined for me to write down, as a detached observer, what had happened.
Once I understood what I was doing, with each commitment I wakened slightly more from my dream of pure potential. ♦
~ ~ ~
It was a failure of my imagination that made me keep leaving people. All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings: moments to survive, record, and, once recorded, safely forget.
I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.
Short tragic love stories that had once interested me no longer did.
What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began. ♦
~ ~ ~
When I first saw the portrait of a sixteenth-century court page, I fell instantly into a deep and enduring love.
The page was in love with a girl that the duke had chosen for one of his cousins. When the duke learned of the page’s courtship, he forbade them to meet again, but after three years he gave in and offered them twenty-four hours to marry. They were married immediately and had eight children.
The wonderful thing about genetics, another friend said, is that you can in fact sort of be with him. She’s right — if you ever meet my husband you might notice a resemblance. ♦
~ ~ ~
During the first few years of my marriage I was highly susceptible to the previous day. I was convinced the marriage would soon be over, but it wasn’t over. The problem was my inability to experience it as ongoing.
Another friend wrote, Marriage isn’t like having a boyfriend or girlfriend but a little more so any more than gold is helium but a little more so. The inner shell of electrons fills and then the next one goes into the next shell, changing everything.