Should She Write This Down?

September 25, 2001

She opened the slim black notebook that she'd picked up from Barnes & Noble on that day back in August when everything had made sense. Or was it that everything made 'cents'? She knew now to pay with change first. Change always first. The coins in her hand pouring out into the cashier's hands at McDonald's on that hot Friday when she bought fries and a small vanilla ice cream cone.

It was okay to eat French fries on Fridays. It was 'Fry-day'! Otherwise, she knew her father would be furious at her for eating fattening foods. His sister had passed away back in August at age 52 of a heart attack. She didn't want to have a heart attack. She was twenty-one years old.

She took her black ballpoint pen and started writing. All she could get down on the fresh, lined paper was this. "Maybe I should write this down."

June 11, 2007

He opened his new black Classic Moleskin notebook. He had stopped journaling about two years ago when he got married. Why was he picking the habit back up again after all this time?

He was twenty-seven, with a 'real' job and a wife and a three-bedroom apartment with the large windows that streamed with sunlight through the blinds. Was he blind for not seeing the truth? He didn't know what he didn't know. How could he?

He started writing with a black pen in his distinctive scratchy script. Distinct only to him, maybe. He wrote "Three things have prompted me to start writing again."

What were they? She only knew because she'd read his journal. He'd let her open it and pour through the pages, examining his inner life, trying to decipher his distinctive script.

April 30, 2008 5:30AM

She was awake. Awake early in the morning with the blackbirds singing. Were they blackbirds? Maybe. She had a feeling she hadn't had in almost seven years. She was recovering from her manic episode when she wrote her first entry in her journal. Now, instead of expensive shopping sprees, she shopped compulsively at CVS with coupons and Extra Bucks and no one blinked an eye. Except for her.

She knew herself. She knew what she was capable of, where her mind could take her and where her body would take her. She knew that writing in a journal at six o'clock in the morning was not her normal behavior. But there was always the thought: maybe she should write this down. THIS.

What was this? Was this a mood upswing with the birds and the sunshine and the spring? Was this hypomania? Was this madness?

She had gone to bed at midnight with a 5mg dose of Ambien, but she never felt like she was able to lose her self-awareness and consciousness. Her body had rested; her mind had not been able to shut down.

She got a new haircut and highlights yesterday. She hadn't gone since January. She had gone back to her old stylist. Was she going back in time?

Her husband was asleep upstairs in their bed. The alarm wouldn't go off for another hour. She didn't think she'd gotten up before the alarm in the nearly three years they'd been married, living in this apartment, sleeping in their bed.

She made herself some chamomile tea. Her body felt relaxed in her old familiar Papasan chair with the oatmeal-colored cushion.

Was her pulse racing? She took a deep breath. She took another. She paused. She thought and looked up from her notebook at the window as the sky got lighter, the trees greener. She could hear her neighbor turn on the shower.

May 4, 2008 9AM

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June 25, 2008 8:30PM or 6:30PM or 7:30PM

She was flying home. She had left so early in the morning to go out West to the place where she'd started, but she had never been. She had returned to the mountains she had never seen, except with newborn eyes. She wondered what was the same about her as when she was born. What had already formed?

She had kept all of her records since childhood: birth certificate, immunization record, P.E. physicals, report cards, letters, greeting cards, ticket stubs, programs, certificates of achievement, sticky notes, journals, her first diary, plane tickets, brochures, medical tests, hospital documents, photographs, stories, poems, tapes, videos, books, magazines, newspapers, marriage certificate, receipts, postcards, yearbooks, an obituary, and THIS.

She was one of the most documented people she knew, dead or alive.

She was alive and she was an archive. She left the place of her birth and she was going home. What did she find in the mountains of Colorado?

She worked as a documentation specialist and her specialty was herself—now, always—she will always do this. Look out of her newborn eyes and out of windows to see where she was, what she had left behind, and where she was going.

She took herself everywhere she went, always with the same things: music, camera, pen, books, her black Moleskin journal. Thoughts that became words that she wrote down between here and there. Between D.C., and Dallas, Denver, Chicago, and Boulder in between. The boulder in between. Bolder.

"I belong here on this page," she wrote. "I have always belonged on this page."

She'd seen this before—the horizon from a small portal 30,000 feet in the air, and she will see it again. She remembered her first time; she had been eleven years old and felt the same as she did now—small, quiet, independent from all places, carrying my things, and waiting to land, but wanting to stay in this place at the same time.

Landing was finite. Something had ended. This had ended. She didn't want it to ever end. She wrote:

"This will never end as long as I stay on this page and keep looking out the window and thinking about THIS."

She never wrote another word in that black Moleskin notebook. Neither did he, in his.

February 19, 2021 4:30PM

Now it is February 2021, and they are together, and $20,000 richer. Her father had finally told her the truth. Her aunt had left her all the money she'd made from her invention of some kind of device to keep fans cool at Dodger Stadium in the 1980s.

She knew she reminded her father of his sister. But she was determined to live her life, and now—with this money, this cold, hard cash— she could finally rest, look up from her laptop, and see her husband reading on their beige couch, the late winter sun barely keeping the living room lit through the blinds.

It was Saturday, and he'd taken their son to McDonald's to get a hamburger and fries. Did he pay with change first? Was he the kind of person who would do that? Pour out of himself into someone else the change that they needed so desperately?

He had been that person for her for all these years.

What was she going to do now?