Prompt: Read some entries from a notebook, diary, or some kind of journal---either unpublished or in print, and possibly a diary of your own from the past. Then describe how the writer uses the journal, and the sense of self created in it.
The guy that I deified my Freshman Fall (and, oh, did I fall) was one for writing things down. His room in Morse was decorated with drawings from when he was five, snippets of thoughts he’d written down on napkins at a cousin’s bar mitzvah when he was nine, lyrics of a song from his trip to Jamaica years back. When things went south (our relationship, not Jamaica), I had a hard time letting him go. I missed him physically, but I also missed his influence – telling me what classes to take, what movies to see, what to do with my life.
And so I went home from the sadness of New Haven to the dark, cold confines of Buffalo. Still miserable on New Year’s Day, and missing Him, I thought of ways to bring Him to me in my personal tundra. I decided to start writing daily in a Word document. I named it “Diary.” I wrote about Him but also about the guy who I’d replaced Him with, and the guy from Buffalo that I’d substituted that guy for, the girls with whom I went out with for dinners and to art galleries but who, after four short months, already seemed so different. I wrote about revenge and Kobe beef and “self-indulgent poppycock.” In five days I covered a lot of ground.
And then, after January 5th – silence. It made me wonder what had happened on the 6th, the Day of Three Kings; had I been too drunk that night to come home and write? Had I convinced myself that there was more to life than Him simply by writing about my other goings on? Whatever the reason, my project abruptly stopped, as could be expected from the failed New Years Resolution that it turned out to be.
Today, I wrote a new entry in “Diary.” There’s a new boy and a new plan, but, somehow, the link between the Freshman and the Junior is stronger than one might expect.
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