070103

On my twenty-sixth birthday, I received a red notebook as a gift which I kept as my diary. The pages of the initial entries are torn out and it begins with five recipes and a travel log, eight months after I received the notebook. It would take me over four years to finish filling its pages.

The first travel log is of my trip to New York, consisting of no more than the list of places we visited. Another travel log follows it, this one to New Orleans. Only one blank page separates these two trips. So according to my diary, a year and a half of married life means no more than a single page that went unwritten...well, I don't disagree.

At times I went months without writing anything. Sometimes I wrote page after page in a single day. Various trips, long and short, people I met, people I lost, books I read, dreams I dreamt, my desires, fears, pains....they are all there, condensed into a little red notebook.
The last entry in the diary was in mid-October of 2007. A good dozen or so pages are left, but I will leave them be. By far, this has been the most difficult journal to write in, and I care not to start another. This one, with all its mental and emotional burden, took too much out of me as it is. And my handwriting is becoming more and more illegible anyway.


10.4.06
...The mystique subsided, and I dreamt of Pluto, now a dwarf planet, all night long.