Day 27

Day 27 –  I stood some books up straight to make room for another one on the shelf and discovered an old travel journal tucked behind the row. I store my journals out of sight because I don’t want anyone to read them, including me. The writing is terrible, and worse, so painfully self-conscious, that it generally takes a decade before even I can look at it again. I remember burning a journal once, or many pages from it, that I kept when I was a teen because the thoughts noted in it repulsed me so much. Now I’m a writer and spend 70% of my day reading my own thoughts.

The travel journal I found today is 11 years old. I kept it when my best friend, Molly, and I traveled around Europe together. There are some gem lines. Here’s one regarding a guy I met at a hostel, a Jewish-Canadian wearing Teva Sandals who serenaded us with Ben Harper and Hayden songs, so, obviously you can guess what came next, “I brought him back to my room. With Molly passed out in the bed next to mine a few feet away, the risk was clear, but not compelling, so we exchanged fervid kisses without discretion, and our clothes were quickly discarded.”

We exchanged promises with “drunk and sleepy hearts. We were strangers and that was the best part.”

I don’t think the rhyme was intentional. Also, what I was reading at the time that made me want to write like that?

At one point I remark how “fucking romantic looking out train windows is.” Molly and I had a lot of quiet train rides. I remember trying to figure out what I should do with my life, what kind of person to be. I remember too, my mom telling me that she wondered the same thing riding across India and Turkey by train in the early 70s with my dad. In my travel journal I ask myself if I’ll become, a lawyer, a teacher or writer, or mother and wife. Reading it now, I feel like I’m answering myself.

We forget all the different people we’ve been. It’s too easy. This evening, for example, I’m a totally different person from who I was this morning.

At six o’clock this morning, while walking Fritz, I found 3 fake leaves in different locations on the ground. When I saw the first, I stopped and asked myself, “what was I thinking when I saw that fake leaf?” I remembered. It was a big, round happy thought-wish and it charged me to think this was a sign affirming it. I kept walking half a block and found another fake leaf, identical to the first.

It was too much! I avoided looking at the ground, walked another half block and let Fritz pull me across the street. As we crossed, not believing it happened twice, I looked at the place I saw the first leaf and made myself recall what I had been thinking. Then Fritz stopped to pee on a tangle of vines. I looked down and saw, in a pile of flowers and leaves, another fake leaf. I laughed out loud and kept laughing, now and again, until we finished our walk and headed home.