Notes From My Younger Self

I just read a very old journal/diary that I wrote when I was 21, just after I had met Andrew, before I actually started college, when I was waiting tables and living with my mother & sister in Florida. It's filled with poems (some quite good, in a way) and speculations on what will come and what had been. Things I have totally forgotten. Things I wish I had forgotten.

The journal was in a box of books that had been slated to be thrown away, out in the garage, which we cleaned up yesterday. (Yes! Amazingly we can both park in it again and there's a pile of junk waiting for the garbage men who I plan to bribe with a cash tip so they'll take it all!) I sat and read it for a while, despite the cat yelling at me, and having tons of things to do today, and needing to get dressed before the garbage men get here or have to "tip" them wearing my "wife beater" t-shirt & pj pants, (wife beater shirt being a tiny bit see-through and "nippley" would make it very embarassing to be caught in....)

And I wonder. Did I deliberately try to throw that thing away? I don't think I would have! I wonder how it got in the pile of junk books! I know that the box was filled up around the time we redid the floors in our house, so it's possible that the book accidentally made its way into the junk books box and I didn't notice it. But I looked for its companion book, a blue one to this one's red silk Oriental cover. And so far I haven't seen it. I hope it didn't get thrown out! I believe the blue one was the period before I met Andrew, during the whole angst-ridden evil ex boyfriend years. It would be sad if I had lost that! I don't know what would have possessed me to throw it out. I also know that no one else would have done it--Andrew would have said "Hey, is this yours?"

Whatever happens in life, it's always interesting to get a letter from yourself. That's the point of this blog, in a way, a digital journal. I save all the posts, and am happy because I haven't written in a journal regularly since that little red satin book I found this morning. Oh, there are a few random books lying about with one or two entries in them. But the blog has reopened a part of my own self-expression that I haven't explored in ages. And it's so much easier because digital. But you don't get the scrawly cartoon drawings I pepper most writing with (not very often, anyway.) Probably lucky for you. :)