Decades of Record

What leads you there is a mystery, but suddenly you've found yourself late one evening lifting the lid off a crate of old journals and falling into the seductive rabbit-hole of miasmic nostalgia.

Intrigue mingles with horror as you dare to open each crinkled page and decipher old handwriting styles and bygone syntaxes. It's like reading someone else's journals, especially the older ones. But a certain guilt forms in the pit of your stomach because you cannot deny they are your words, your pathetic clingings, your outlandish aspirations, your perverted admissions, your melodramatic love affairs.

You wish you'd never even started. All these orphaned, half-formed diatribes that reveal more than they should are best kept forever! in this storage crate or better yet buried in some unmarked vault on a deserted island. You think to yourself, one day I'm going to die and someone is going to find these and I will be spinning in my grave as my dirtiest of laundry is brought into the light of day. You shiver with shame as you imagine your own mother or sister finding these and pouring over their sordid contents.

Someone long ago told you to start keeping these diaries. And, in fact, you remember exactly who it was: a high school English teacher, who said sagely that if you recorded your own life you could return to the old missives and take stock of your growth and progress (or lack thereof). You could observe your own life via these recordings much as your own anthropologist, observing significant or errant patterns and evolutions. You considered the wisdom in this and started scribbling the years away.

But it barely works in this way. Much like old photographs, once you've gotten into your 40s and have taken snapshots of every birthday, every gathering, every vacation, every boyfriend or girlfriend, they just become this obscene albatross of nostalgia that you cannot bring yourself to discard, yet really don't want ever to linger upon too intently.

Decades of record takes up space, in photo albums, spiral notebooks, fancy yellowed journals, drawing pads, and are in the end so much dead space taking up your apartment, filling some corner of a room or closet, and represent more than anything a significant heavy layer upon the carapace of your aging being: one more possession that has no use other than representing fragments of your identity, something you keep simply because you cannot throw away.