Feathered Watermelon

Yesterday I realized I’ve been keeping a paper journal since I was twelve. I’ve been keeping a paper journal for twenty years, man.

I started out writing in big five-section spiral notebooks and at first would use a different color pen for each section. I would write, in big block letters on the front page: THINK ABOUT HOW YOU WOULD FEEL. NOW, CLOSE THE BOOK. The page after that, for years and years and years, would be my vital statistics: how old I was, my address and phone number, what grade I was in, who my friends were. At least until the end of high school (maybe even into college) the journal actually had a name: I called it “Feathered Watermelon” and I would write to it like it was a real person. “No one understands me but you, F.W.,” I’d scribble mournfully, sucking hard on an apple juice box and looking up at my pictures of unicorns and dragons and cats all over the walls. “You’re all I have.”

Getting my first period (which was worse, the fact that I started bleeding in the middle of the street in South Miami near the old Bakery Center the afternoon my mom was going away for the weekend and I had a pool party the next day, or the fact that I did so while wearing yellow jeans with purple flowers on them?). Drama club and youth group. Bringing a book to my friend Amy’s high school football games just so I could see her play the big bass drum during halftime. The summer my dad broke his wrist and I had to try to make his espressos every morning, getting the steamed milk wrong every time, every day. The year we had three litters of kitten in the back yard, reviews of movies I’d star in and books I’d write, my first car, my first kiss, feeding the homeless people under the overpass, this song that I made up on the sixth grade camping trip to the Everglades called The Gumbo Limbo Shuffle, going to the beach with the Key Girls (who didn’t know they were the Key Girls), liking boys who didn’t like me.

When the hurricane came in 1992 I was in Jamaica with my youth group on a mission trip and we were all trying to call home to our parents. “SAVE MY NOTEBOOKS,” I screamed to my mom over the phone, sick with fear, not even comprehending what the storm actually meant or that when we finally made it back to the States she’d defy the National Guard to come and find me after curfew. She did, she paused in the middle of evacuating and wrapped them all up and put them on the highest shelf in the house. All my clothes and Cabbage Patch Kids and books and furniture were ruined in Hurricane Andrew but the journals were saved and that was all I cared about. After we came home from Jamaica some of us slept in the church hall every night because they still had air conditioning and I would sit out in the hallway writing in the fluorescent lights.

My freshman year roommate with the name as funny as mine who shaved her head and did differential equations naked in our room (wearing a hat). How they still said “rad” and skateboarded in Southern California as if it was 1986 and not 1993. The first time in six years I’d been allowed to wear jeans to school. My first psychology class. Learning to speak Italian. Learning to swing and waltz and polka. Going to South Beach with the Key Girls (who now knew they were the Key Girls) when we were home on break and lying about our ages to be groupies for our friends’ Christian rock band. Falling in stupid blind crazy love for the first of many times. Becoming friends with Anna by challenging her to a dance-off, Rob giving me a lecture on Feynman in the gravity well wearing only a towel, sneaking around the 5C campus in the dark to attempt to play French-A-Wench or go urban spelunking, going through the Del Taco drive-through nude, the bathroom surprise party. Sobbing on the floor listening to Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan and hanging viciously up on Manya one time because I would not hear what she was telling me about a boy I liked who didn’t like me, just as I would refuse to listen to her (and everyone else I knew) about that same boy six or seven or eight years later. Finding and losing faith, several times. That summer after graduation. My first job, my first apartment. My first bellydance class. Deciding to go to grad school and the long long drive out of California another summer.

I forget when I had Mom send me all the old journals from home, whether it was before or after I moved to Seattle. At some point I graduated to just plain blank books (unlined, thank you very much) and stopped referring to my notebooks as a semi-sentient warm-blooded fruit along the way. I found some really good ones at Old Navy, oddly, to bring with me here, and I haven’t found anything like them since: small enough to fit in my bag, unlined, little elastic wrap thingy. Like a very cheap Moleskine. I always write in black pen now and seem to constantly be running out of ink. The notebook I have right now is a plain black spiral-bound sketchbook from Whitcoull’s—you would not believe how difficult it is to find just plain unlined blank books, in either the Northern or Southern Hemispheres—and I have pasted a postcard of weird New Zealand fish on the front.

The severely emotionally disturbed adolescent boys at my first practicum placement. Eight psychotherapy clients a day and the long bus ride home in the dark, where I would try to decompress and get ready to do it all over again the next day. Not knowing if my dad was alive for a couple of days after 9/11. That first basement room right down the street from Thai of Wedgwood, where I ate twice a week (pad see ewe, please, with extra broccoli no cabbage) for a year, and then the Lake City house, and then the Green House, and then the Blue House. Seeing the possible cougar prints. Being unemployed for what seemed like forever, getting more into bellydance, going to five weddings a summer. Going to the ABL parties. Making and losing friends I didn’t ever think I’d make or lose. Breaking my heart so thoroughly I thought I’d die, learning the true meanings of betrayal and loyalty. Turning thirty, turning thirty-one. Conceiving the Top Secret Plans. Getting on the plane. Seeing the octopus at the Octopus Resort. Getting here. Living here, now, writing in my paper journal on a pink bed in a new house in a new city in a new country in a new hemisphere, a new life.

Those journals, twenty years’ worth, are currently wrapped up in some garbage bags and plastic boxes in my cousin’s garage in Seattle, or else I would totally be blowing the dust off them and excerpting them here, you know I would. I don’t take stock at the beginning of each notebook anymore, nor do I plead with anyone to just close the book, but I do still sign each entry with my name, just as if I’m writing a twenty-year letter. I always think of each notebook, when I finish it, as needing to off-gas for a while before I can look at it again, to let a half-life or two go by before it’s safe to handle. I wondered, too, when I started this blog all those years ago, if I would stop writing in the paper journal. I wondered if I’d need to write about myself quite so much on dead trees if I was doing it on the internet where people could see. How self-obsessed can one person be, you know? And my paper journal is, like, really boring reading, unlike this wry and witty screed you’re currently reading. It’s just the same couple of themes over and over again, totally unlike the online version: 1) Here’s What I Did This Weekend, 2) I Don’t Know What To Do With My Life, 3) I Kind Of Have Body Issues and 4) I Like Someone Who Doesn’t Like Me. I sound, at thirty-two, remarkably the way I did when I was twelve.

I can’t stop, though. I will never stop. It doesn’t happen unless I write about it, somewhere, somehow. In fact one of the more subtle ways I lie is by omitting to record something in my paper journal, password-protected only by its location on the floor by my bed, so completely do I believe in its version of reality. Last year I said, when I thought I’d lost a mere five years of entries that it felt like losing a limb; if I anything ever happens to these notebooks–God forbid–full of the same sentences as I try to become human, over and over, year by year, decade by decade, it will be like losing my heart.