I have kept a blog, or online journal of some kind or other, since 2001. 2001. That is ten years, ten very long years, ten years in which I went from being 20-years-old and oh so lost to 30 and very nearly found.
My very first ‘blog’ was on a site called Diary-X. I blogged there for a good four years, before eventually switching to LiveJournal. For part of those years, I considered myself a writer. I lived in Halifax and I wrote for The Coast and I did other freelance work, writing and editing, and I felt myself on a path.
Sometime in 2006, after I’d stopped writing there, Diary-X went through a catastrophic server failure, and every single post I’d written -- every single post every single person had written, in fact -- was lost. I was sad but I had moved on, I thought. I lived in Toronto by then, and had different things in my life, different people. I doubt I thought of myself as a writer anymore -- I was working in accounting and was feeling lost again, but I wasn’t the same person by that time.
But I have been thinking about that diary lately, and wishing I could read parts of it again. There is insight there, in who I was. I walked away from that person but there were things worth keeping. Those chapters didn’t need to be over -- those chapters weren’t even chapters, really, just commas and semi-colons, small punctuations in a longer story.
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was miraculously able to dig up a few of my old posts. It was so strange, happy and sad at the same time, to read through them again. I was struck by how much I noticed, how much I felt compelled to record, to remember, to imbue with meaning. I miss that, how I saw everything and everything meant something. That was worth keeping.
This was a post I wrote in 2004, and I thought it was pretty and although I don’t miss that aching loneliness, I miss the meanings. I miss the words.
I thought about pretending that I couldn’t remember who I wrote this about, but that didn’t seem fair, to me or to him. So this is for Jim, who knew me when I was lost, and for Shaun, who found me.
*****
Saturday, February 28, 2004
little miss.
Lying in my bed until the sun goes down, until hours after the sun goes down. I miss you. Tangled in my own sheets, in my own thoughts, in grey and white and shades of blue. I miss you. Wrapped in this blue rectangle that is my room, watching the sky go from blue to grey to black, sucking the colour out of my walls, out of my things, out of my air. I miss you. All I can see is night time snow, and all I can hear are cars and coughing, cars and coughing, and all I can taste and smell and feel is lonely. I miss you.
(I miss you.)
I want to be with you in the spring, when everything turns green and sweet-smelling. When all this snow melts. When the night-time takes longer to get here. When there is freshness and newness and sun and hope, and those first glimpses of new grass, of dry pavement.
(I miss you.)
I want to be with you in the summer, when it's too hot to put your bare feet on the sidewalk. When the air smells like salt. When the night-time takes forever to get here. When everything is as alive as it's ever going to be, when the rain breaks like bread, just as glorious.
(I miss you.)
But mostly, I want to be with you now, in between these blue walls, as this sun goes down. I want you here when the light goes away. We'll bring our own colour, and a picnic. We'll bring our own spring, our own summer. We'll melt snow between these blue walls, collect it in a giant cup and drink it down. We'll wash away the taste of lonely.
(I miss you.)
