Audio: Read by the author.

 

If only I could live my life, not write it,
I’d have double the experience

and be better at nothingness, at being present.
The page, I once believed, offers permanence,

sanctifying time, making it longer,
but now I see my words as susceptible,

even if digital, to fire, flood, misplacement.
To misinterpretation. To accidental

download by enemy. I don’t yet want them
to be lost, but I dread the possibility

that they won’t self-destruct at the end
of my life, or the end of my lucidity.

Maybe I’ve been using paper all wrong,
committing to ink what should live in my head,

which is part of my body, which will not last.
Long ago, in college, a friend once said

he would never keep a journal; he preferred
to live in the moment. Back home in June,

I threw the lot of them, dating back to childhood,
into a rose-red shopping bag—we reused

every one—then put the bag out with the trash.
Thank the stars or our thrift for its luminosity:

my mother asked what was in it, then ran
down the driveway, hauled it back up. Her family

had once lost everything. She knew what I wanted
to be, what I already was. “You have to keep them!”

she yelled. She never yelled. Even my friend,
hearing it later, said the same. What worked for him

might not be right for me. He loved to argue
and was always there, vociferous, ready to engage,

while I was too receptive, too easily swayed,
though I often swatted back. That’s what college

is for, the wisdom goes, late-night conversation
with challenging peers. A few years later,

we were no longer friends, not through conflict
but cliché: he had wanted more, I had demurred,

and then there was nothing to say. But maybe
I’d been partial to aspects of his attention—

maybe all the platitudes were true. I had failed
to consider, despite constant reflection,

what my being there must have conveyed.
Reflection is simply an image, a face in a mirror;

to look upon is not the same as to examine.
Perhaps there is such a thing as a neutral observer.

Each night, I had written Here is what happened
like a kid whose pen makes her small life exciting,

then gone on mistaking the plot for the story,
as if the point of writing were writing.