diary
One for gratitude. One for dreams. One for ‘everything else,’ a category so vast and so poorly delineated that it is effectively a second brain equipped with a ribbon marker and no organising principle whatever.
I have, to be transparent with the record, written in none of them. They sit in a neat, hopeful little stack upon the corner of the desk, each one representing a subtly different woman I had fully and sincerely intended to become by Friday of this week.
I used to read this stack as evidence, a small daily exhibit in the ongoing trial of whether I am serious about my own life. Three empty journals, the prosecution would say, gesturing. Three further things she bought and abandoned. The defence, historically, has struggled.
But I have begun to think the buying is not the failure and the emptiness is not the verdict. The buying is the overture, the reaching toward a self I can already half-perceive, and reaching is not nothing. It is the very opposite of surrender. It is the bashful first draft of caring.
So I have made my peace with the stack. I am, at heart, a devoted collector of stationery and of intentions, who occasionally, when the light is right and the moon consents, has a genuine feeling and commits it to one of them. Three empty journals is not a failure. It is a very well-stocked, patiently waiting possibility, and it will keep.
the diary lives on a site with a moon phase, a daily oracle and a shelf of things reviewed with feeling.
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