Diary #3: the one where the cover says 'day dreams' for some reason
There is a gap in the journals where I apparently don't write my freshman year of High School. The next book picks up mid-way through my sophomore year in 1997. This is the first diary that seems to be written by an adult-sounding Leah whom I recognize to be myself, or at least a more emotional and clothing-shedding version of myself. I flew through the reading because I was so engaged in my own story. My own VERY RACY story.
June 13, 1997
In the darkness I was waiting for him to touch me, and he did. But very slowly and hesitantly. We lay on the bed for almost a half hour, testing how intimate we could become. It started off slowly and it took a really long time for our lips to touch. But when they did, it was amazing —I felt as if a dam were breaking inside and overflowing. We stopped for a moment and I whispered, "I missed you so much." He whispered back, "Me too."
This book tells the slobber-drenched beginning of a relationship that I know from memory ended rather unpleasantly. Mostly ALL I remember about this relationship is its bad ending, in fact. So it was a different thing entirely to read these Harlequin-Romance-inspired excerpts that seemed to come out of someone else's life, some else's joyously sensuous teenage life.
I wonder if that's what enticed me to read these journals in the first place. What entices anyone to sneak a peak at someone else's journal. Every entry is a story in progress. It's all so LIVE. Yeah, of course a novel is a story in progress or even an autobiography, but those have the benefit of authorship or hindsight. A journal writer is flying by the seat of her pants, trying desperately to capture the moment she's living in. She doesn't know that this relationship will be the single most damaging thing in her life, that she'll want more than anything to forget every moment of it, that she will be so thankful later to be saved from it. She only says, look here! this is what I'm living!
She says to her diary, to the high school boy she's making out with, to her unknown future reader, yes to her very own self she says: Look at me. Look at me and love me.
I think both my high-school journaling and my sexual exploits described therein were designed to meet this end. Look at me and love me. The assurance of love was all I ever wanted. It's hard to imagine from my vantage point now, now that I have a wonderful husband and two beautiful children who fight over who gets to sit next to me at any given moment. It's hard to imagine I ever needed MORE love and attention. But at one point I did, in 1997, and I don't want to mock it as immature or juvenile. The voice in this journal is my own (if uncensored) and in the absence of love I will do ANYTHING, I will WRITE ANYTHING to feel like I can fleetingly touch it.
I tried to read another diary and I couldn't get past the first page without blogging
There are four more notebooks to go in the re-read my high school diaries series, and I'm sweating a little bit about this project I've taken on. For one thing, I'm afraid reading my past writing might be slowly making me a worser writer. The more I read paragraphs like the following, the more I think this might pass for acceptable syntax:
Aug 14, 1997
Pretty soon I'm going to find myself a full blown adult. But I guess there's nothing I can do about it. I'm MAKING it happen.
Pretty soon I'm going to find myself a full blown adult? Where? Under the bed? If I keep on reading these journals, I'll probably find one on the next page..
Oh! That was a sex joke I made there! See what I said about this project dumbing down my writing?
Because that's the other problem with reading these journals... so much sexiness! It's basically the only side of my life I felt was important enough to chronicle. Making out... making out... seriously, I could go the rest of my life without reading the words "second base" in print. And I don't know whether to feel repulsed or titillated. These days I'm closer to being a parent of a teenager than to being an actual teenager, so I guess the tales of young libido should make me nervous. But I also associate with the person in these journals. Indeed, it's as if all the characters aged with me, and I can picture my adult friends running around after reunion playing spin the bottle for seven minutes in the closet. Pot bellies and all. G-ross!
But even so, reading about sex cannot help but be (um, dare I be honest?) a turn on. Which feels weird at a time in my life when I would prefer not to engage with sexual thoughts. Seriously, if any stray desires crops up in me, I just can't ask Dan for help... having sex at this stage in my pregnancy is a difficulty akin to circus acrobatics.
And yet it's hard to stay away from the project. There are four journals I haven't read yet, and who knows what they may hold? Right now the children are sweetly jumping on their beds, and the next diary beckons to me. (They asked me to tie their legs in restraints because they're being mermaids. This is the reason I'm trying to throw these journals away, so the incriminating evidence is out of the house by the time the boys realize where their kinky streak came from.)
So I have to press on. What will I find in the rest of these journals? Will it be exciting or horrifying? I can only take a tip from my younger self and embrace the unknown:
I feel like I am a clear shelf. I don't know what I'll put on it yet, but it's gonna be important. I can imagine these shelves five years in the future. As I look at them, imaginary objects float in and out of their shadow and grace my life with their presence. Photographs drift in and linger, than drift away as well. I am not afraid.