At my age, going through decades and decades of personal journals I’ve scribbled in, collected and arranged chronologically on a book case i had specially built for them,
I’m reminded of this: my blank journal pages , virgin and sweetly fresh and inviting, were always the place I could go – and did go – to write whatever I was thinking and feeling any time of the day or night…..year after year after year after year…..Momma gave me my first blank book when I was 15….but I’d declared my adoration of the movie of WEST SIDE STORY even earlier in my little pink diary with lock and key…I died with Maria, wept over Tonys body so much , that when the movie ended i could hardly breathe….and I had to write it down in that little pink book….with lock and key. I wonder whatever happened to that little girl book.
I remember telling a therapist years ago: “My journal pages are my perfect Saturday night date”……..i knew early on that those pages would never ghost me, turn me down or reject me…they were always willing, open, receptive and embracing. My journals have always been the one true thing in my life……i shaped them, page after overly emotional page, paragraph after logically sorted paragraph, sentence after sentence of spontaneous expression from parts of me I never even knew existed until I put them down on those
blank pages.
Tears have stained those pages…wine has splattered some of them….inks of every imaginable color have filled them…..page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page of handwriting, at times neat and orderly, at other times outrageously chaotic and large….my left hand with pen after pen after pen after pen has served me well.
I went through a romantic fountain pen era, even going so far as to collect some elegant glass pens and torrid scarlet and purple inks, but my main instruments of self-examination have been whatever cheap or free ball points i could find….i must have collected hundreds of them…most of them drying up and useless before ever being used…those free ball points with advertising on the sides of them….insurance companies, car washes, ad agencies, gas stations, restaurants, therapists offices, banks especially….
Each of us has a life worth writing about, and definitely worth reading later down the road…when I would meet a new Acting class at NYU, those fresh faces staring at me to learn how to become stars on the NYC stage, I’d tell them I was excited to open the books of their individual lives…and that they should start their own journals to chart where their own lives would take them…..i developed an entire series of journal exercises to train the students how to observe and record every possible moment of their rich existences….those exercises would make a fun book, I think…but …well….i seem possessed of no particular urge to produce a book of any kind…all i want to do is write….. and write and write some more…
I imagine I’ll even keep writing once I’ve gone to my Heavenly rest…no doubt there will be some terrific stories thereafter…in the hereafter.
As long as I can continue to express ME, my thoughts, my innermost secrets, it’s entirely possible I may never actually die…….and if I do, when I do, there will be even more stuff to write about than ever before…..interesting, dramatic, engaging, thrilling and all mine.
I think, therefore I am?
I write…therefore I am.
No question about that.