when i was sixteen i started a journal. like many others do, i start a journal and it lasts only a matter of days. i’m lucky if they spread over a month. i found my journal from 2007 tucked in my bookshelf last night. it is your typical sixteen year old bullshit. there’s an entry about fighting with my girl friends, releasing my frustration with their spastic mind games. details about a movie my boyfriend and i saw, lists of the things i did every few days, and lists of things i aspired to do and be. most of the pages are full of the cold winter jeanine and i spent together. there are receipts, wrappers, hair dye instructions. lyrics written by regina spektor and death cab tucked in the margins. i remember that winter vividly. we wore shorts during a cold winter snow-day and drank coffee constantly. many afternoons spent at merry anns writing songs and planning our lives splitting cheese fries and playing songs on the juke box.
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i think about this winter a lot lately, and this made me unearth my own version of this journal. it smells like glue, just a whole six months of ticket stubs and ambition in a composition notebook i displayed in my senior year art fair.
it’s clear i was vulnerable and naive, but i was also open and earnest. good things happened to me, and i let them.
there are a lot of things about myself from the past year or so that feel foreign and dark, and while i can’t change that, i know that the past few months have felt good. have felt like the time when i was keeping this journal in late night, over-caffeinated spells. there is an undercurrent of adventure that comes when you trade being a jaded cynic in for letting yourself be uncool and excited.
we may have felt like detention and arthur and top 10 lists were worthy of writing down, but we made it through a weird winter with really great memories and lots of energy and big hearts. i’ll always love that about us, that that has been our compulsion since we were 17.
