Dear Diaries

I’ve recently become privy to the heart of a 13 year old girl, via her secret and inner-most thoughts kept in her diaries. Behind her still child-like print and neon-colored ink, her thoughts lie in wait, behind her words, even, hoping to be discovered. It’s hard, sometimes, wading through the cotton candy that is firework flames and rapid fire heartbreak, but there’s a person there, a hint of what she will become.
Reading the account of her days is an experience. This girl works in extremes; opposites are built into her nature, and thus I am forced to operate on her same extremes, her same paradoxical emotions transferred to me. I laugh at her dramatic sentences, her wild emotions prefaced with haughty words and grand phrases. I sober at her expressions of her doubt, the quiet questioning of herself—with these she is less bold. I am emboldened when she is sure of herself, painfully afraid when she is challenged.
Our likeness is beyond our keeping of journals—I started writing at the same age she is now. I still have my journals; she will revere her pages until we are both too old to know we wrote them. She has become who I am; she is a part of me. Her 13 year old feelings belong to me at 21. Her hopes, mine. Her doubts, mine, too. She questions the same things I do, and faithfully accepts ideals I embrace along with her. “Who am I?” she asks, and I echo, “What am I doing with myself?” “Am I capable of love?” she wonders. I answer, “Is loneliness forever?” “Am I understood?” we beg in unison.
At times I want to scream at this girl, to rip out her words and abuse her immaturity. Other times, I embrace her in her fragility, long to protect her vulnerable heart. I want to give her the answers, show her how she can live and be happy, but then I remember, I am without answers. Just like her, I have only questions.
I don’t know why this girl has chosen to let me into her life, her world of possible lies, of beautiful truths. Perhaps I am the actualization of her desire for her secrets to be known by another person. Perhaps I am the person for whom she leaves her diary on a café table, the person she wants to read her thoughts and know her truth. Perhaps she needs the affirmation of her voice—as if someone reading her words validates their reason for existing. Or maybe only that she is not an apostle of secrets, a treasurer of mystery. She may be too bold, or not bold enough, too full of lies, or too strict with honesty. But I think in her writing, I have learned only a little of who she is, and infinitely more of who I am becoming.

time enough for words

I’ve had this poem in my brain since early Thursday; I’ve been working it and reworking it, and I finally got a sketch of it down in class last night. It’s been coming to me for days in the form of images—ephemeral photographs in my mind to which I’m struggling to ascribe language and words. It’s about 20 lines or so, folded in my pocket, being carried around in the anticipation of something to click in my brain and make it fit. It’d be a good poem…if someone else would write it. Or if I could make the images in my mind and my vocabulary connect.
Today was the day I would let it rest. Today was the day I would think about everything but that unrhymed demon nesting in my pocket, folded into notebook paper, just waiting to be constructed into something other than the half-formed mess it is right now. So in letting it rest, a completely different poem wrote itself out on my computer screen. I woke up with this new poem coated on my teeth, spoke this new poem to my dash on the drive to work, wrote out this new poem in about an hour at my desk.
I’m jealous of the ease at which this new poem unfurled; frustrated that it should have been more difficult to be justified.
Damn writing.