Diaries and Memories

I've often kept diaries in the past, but I haven't often kept up with them.

In middle school I had a small diary with a lock and key. (Let me just first say that no matter how young you are, I don't understand how you're supposed to do any significant writing when the pages aren't much bigger than your hand. It's uncomfortable to write on and much easier to lose your train of thought when a single paragraph can easily span a few pages.) I never got more than a few entries written.

In high school I started writing in a larger diary, with no lock. This lasted a few more entries than the previous one, but was also ultimately abandoned.

In college, I had an Open Diary account, which later migrated to Livejournal. This is probably the most I've ever written in a diary in my life, but my record of posting updates was spotty at best.

I realized today that part of my reluctance to write is that everything I want to write about that seems "diary-esque" seems, well, mundane... and everything else seems like stuff that I have no authority to write, really. I don't know much about very much, and the things I know a lot about, I still don't feel confident in my ability to post declarations and have them hold up to scrutiny.

But I still have the desire to express myself, and I realized today that there is one thing I know very well - myself. That's not to say I know myself perfectly. But I probably know myself better than anyone else does.

I've never really written about my memories because part of writing for me is wanting someone else to read. (This is probably why online diaries worked so much better for me than hand-written ones.) And I've always sort of felt that no one would really be interested in my memories, so why bother writing them? I haven't done anything particularly remarkable in my life.

But I like reading about other people's memories, so I guess it stands to reason that someone could enjoy reading about mine. Maybe even me, someday when even more of my memories have faded or been replaced by new ones.

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That's a VERY long pre-amble to my purpose here, which is to start writing down my memories - and really, anything else that strikes me as worth writing. But I think I'll be focusing more on memories - and my own thoughts about them - because usually writing about the here and now feels temporary. I don't know what things will be important to me until they still are years later.

And my first memory seems like an appropriate place to start, so here goes.

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I think I have an earlier memory than this one - my 3rd birthday. But since that memory is just of me receiving a plastic electric-blue belt as a birthday gift - and many years later, of my mom denying that they ever gave me a plastic blue belt until I unearthed a photo of said gift being given - it seems sort of unremarkable. (Except - who gives a plastic belt to a three year old as a birthday gift? I think even then I was mystified as to what I could possibly ever use it for.)

But my first substantial memory is from when I was five years old.

I was friends with a girl who lived down the street, Claudia*. She was a year younger than I was, but also very excellent at getting me to do what she wanted me to do. In later years, she would threaten to 'un-invite' me to her birthday party unless we played the games that she wanted to play. She also seemed to have an endless number of friends she could replace me with if I didn't comply to her whims, so I tended to follow along for the most part.

We were playing in front of my parent's suburban split-level house one warm summer day, when I had a brilliant idea. Claudia always won all of the games, even the ones that you couldn't win at. (Or so it seemed at the time, anyway.) What if I suggested a race that I knew I could win? Claudia had her tricycle with her, and despite their similarities to bicycles, anyone who had ever ridden a trike knows that they are really darn slow.

"Claudia - let's race! You ride your tricycle, and I'll run! First to the top of the driveway wins." To my surprise, she agreed. I felt a twinge of guilt - I was proposing a race that I knew I would win - but she DID agree, after all. It wasn't MY fault if she agreed to a race that I would clearly win at. And it was my turn to win at something, right?

"Ready - set - GO!" I took off running up the driveway. I was winning, easily. I felt so confident, so happy.

And then I tripped.

I'm pretty sure my mom had a heart attack from how loudly I was crying. I had essentially skidded on concrete, knee-first, and my left knee was pretty much an open wound. She took me into our mustard-yellow, 70's throwback kitchen and sprayed my knee with antiseptic, then gave me a giant bandage. But I was still upset at the unfairness of it all. It was a race I could have won, but Claudia won the race after all, because I got overconfident. More frustratingly than that, I actually felt like - for a split second - I was in control of the situation, a rare occurrence when playing with Claudia. And then I miscalculated, and that control was gone.

I still have that scar on my knee today, though it's significantly smaller than my memory of the original injury. And it's interesting, I think, that even though it's probably the scar of the injury that helps keep the memory alive, the thing I remember most vividly about it isn't the part where I skinned my knee, but those moments right before I fell, where I felt free and alive and in control.


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* Names changed to protect whoever.