Dear Reader:
I was about ten years old when I started collecting artifacts from different stages in my life. I would tape small objects from familiar places into the pages of my journal, writing down the time and location of the event. There were usually about two journals a year unless I experienced a particularly busy year where I would manage to fill up three, maybe four journals. Of the objects inside the journal, some were stolen, some were given, and some were simply found as they were.
This year, I filled only one journal. It was mostly candy wrappers and receipts from grocery stores and other small items that would have otherwise been thrown away. The years were so foggy despite my documentation and there were few things I could do besides read my old journal, filled with events that seemed to never happen.
I kept a box in the attic with all of my old journals. Some things had fallen from the pages after all of these years of abandonment. Visiting the journals felt like visiting old friends, some of which you’d wish you’d never run into again. It was a process, looking through the pages, but it was a process of bittersweet remembrance that I felt I could never let go of.
I took the box full of journals down for me to spend time flipping through. The first journal in the box hadn’t been opened for a decade. Attached to the first page was an unfilled balloon and a caption that read “I went to Joel’s birthday party today. He gave me this notebook and then punched me a lot. I’m in the hospital now because my nose is broken. January 4th, 1999.”
I flipped to the next page in the journal. It was another tale of another tragedy that had occurred early on in my life. The next page contained the same. It seemed like every page in this small journal documented a time where I felt vulnerable or abandoned. It seemed like no good in my life ever came from any of these journals.
I closed the book. I didn’t need to be reminded of bad memories when it was unnecessary. Sometimes I wonder why I even kept record of the negative side of my past. Sometimes I wonder why I even kept record of my past at all.
There was a fire burning in the fireplace in front of me. I had no need for a false past and a series of books filled with memories of events that never took place. It would have been easy to throw them away, but but I felt it would not give me the sort of destructive relief that I needed this very moment.
I tossed the whole box of them into the fire. Well, toss may be an exaggeration. I placed the journals one by one into the fire, watching my memories burn right in front of my eyes. This one that I’m currently writing in is the only one left. The rest of them are burned, gone forever.
My documentation has been undone, and with it so has my life. There is no one alive who still knows who I am. These journals were the last things preserving who I was. I hate to have kept you this long. And with that, goodbye forever.
-Zero