Dear Diary in Packrat

Anyone who knows me well or knows me from Open Diary knows that I’ve kept a journal since I was 16. I never wrote “dear diary” - I’ve always said it was a journal, because that sounded more journalistic and I had already planned to go to a state college that was well known for its good journalism school and major in journalism. I did; I just didn’t finish. (I didn’t go to classes the first time, and I had to quit the second time because I got a job on a newspaper.)

However, S graduated from that same journalism school and worked for a city newspaper before he became an attorney. (Lawsuit update: we filed a petition for rehearing today.)

But I digress. (I’m good at that. - She says as she digresses again.)

I call my journal “J” - how imaginative! haha

I’m decades away from 16, but I pulled one of my first journals out to see who I was as a poet before I went to college to learn about poetry, which ruined me. I knew as I read the poems what inspired them, and while I can admit they for the most part weren’t “stand alone”, they were outpourings of overwhelming emotion.

“A brief encounter with a man of midnight…“; “materialization into my realization”; “close to me, we barely touch”; “my affection under the protection of midnight shadows”.

My midnight man was a 19-year-old perceived “bad boy”, so called because we usually talked at midnight. The first time we really spent together was under a full moon sky full of stars while we sat on his porch step as he played the guitar.

He had long hair, played the guitar, rode a motorcycle, and had bedroom eyes. I was hooked big time. (One of the reasons I like Transiberian Orchestra so much is for the same reasons - long hair, guitars, although I don’t know what they ride or if they have bedroom eyes; I should wait in line for the meet and greet to check that out…although that would make me a creepy old lady - and again, I digress.)

“materialization into my realization” = he was my dream come true. When we were in high school together I never thought he’d ever know that I existed. I wrote, “My impossible fantasy come true! When I used to see him I never thought that when I was his age I would sit beside him as he shared his music with me, in time spent under the summer sky filled with beautiful stars and a romantic moon.”

He provided a lot of drama for me, but what I wanted with that journal was to “hear” my poetic voice again, to read what poetry I produced when I didn’t overedit myself, when I just let the feelings express themselves. I miss that part of me, and while I recently wrote a few poems, I felt rusty. Stilted.

I’m RustyStiltskin! (At my birth my mom asked my dad for name ideas, and my dad said to call me “Rumplestiltskin” - fancy the nicknames from that! Yeah, I know, I’m digressing again.)

I didn’t actually record as many poems in my journal as I thought I did - they were all kept in a separate notebook save a few. Digging this particular journal out of the pile was a bust. I was 17 - and I was very 17 in its pages. Who I had a crush on that week. Who waved at me on the drag. Who else was draggin’ Main when I was. What they said. Who did what in which class. I had moments of introspection, of learning about life (John Lennon was killed when I was 16, and Ronald Reagan was shot when I kept that journal), but I was a kid being a kid.

I have all my journals stored away, but getting this journal out of the container that holds them all was a task; my cats kept jumping in the container, jumping on the notebooks I had out, knocking them over and mixing them up so that I had to check the dates on the inside cover to know the chronological order, and I get to go through all of that again when I put this journal back.

But all those notebooks showed me how far away I was from that kid, how many other experiences I had that I could never have dreamed I’d have, and that the voice I seek is not elusive but still inside me. I just have to let it out.