Recycling Journals

The summer after I graduated from high school, I threw out all my journals. With a plastic garbage bag next to me, I sat on the floor facing my closet and flipped through each one for the last time. First into the trash bag was my Hello Kitty diary chronically all the injustices of having to eat tuna casserole, nicknamed cat casserole by my dad for reasons deemed inappropriate for dinner table conversations.

Next, I tossed the floppy school-distributed journals with their free writes and the illustrations of my dead iguana in robe with angel wings and a halo. The penciled letters denting their pages were so sloppily scrawled that my middle school thoughts were almost illegible. The garbage bag began to bulge as the woes and joys of freshman year, contained in a self-made diary covered with a left over scrap of wallpaper, were exorcised into the trash can. The flowered journal with the silk tie that I wrote in while propped up in hospital rooms and while lying on the couch with my limb rapped in hot towels to ease the phantom pains gave witness to the days spent watching the ivy creep up the window screen. It went into the garbage along with the journal containing embarrassing confessional poetry. They were followed by the spiral notebooks with pages devoted to Paul and all those angst-filled fights of adolescence.


When I was done, the white plastic of the garbage bag stretched between all pointed corners threatening to burst through its flimsy sides. Curls of sliver wire, bent out of shape on the edges of notebooks, tore little openings as if trying to escape. Stealthy, I hulled it all out to the trash cans on the side of the house. If I anyone saw what I was doing, I knew that they would try to stop me or that they would fish a few journals out of the pile to give to me when I was older and saner. I didn't want a single journal to survive my purge. I lifted the bag over my shoulder and chucked it in. Covering it with flattened cardboard boxes and other bits of recycling, I wished again that I could have burned them but that would have brought on questions. I worried about the journals sitting in a protective clump in some landfill and making their way back some day like the murder in a horror series or an incriminating body floating back to the lake's surface in a cold case thriller. This was as free of them as I could be. I turned back into the house to attack my stuffed animal collection.

In a family of seven, there is no room to leave behind a sanctuary of childhood memories. Eric moved into my room the day I moved out. I threw out almost all my possessions because I thought I was starting anew. Like the dry case of a chrysalis, the pages and pages of my young thoughts and memories seemed to be the barrier I had to rip through to emerge into the world as the fully formed adult I had always dreamed of becoming. I destroyed the intricate little world I had created for myself and felt the exhilarating fear of being delicate and naked, trembling in the vast open of possibility.

Yet, college graduation came and again I disposed of all my trappings. The egg chair, now stripped of its hot pink cover, like so much of my dorm furniture keeps reincarnating itself in siblings and in-laws college apartments and dorm rooms. Paul and I came back from our honeymoon to an empty apartment and a stack of gifts wrapped in white. We built up a home only to tear it down. Now, those gifts are packed back in boxes and crammed into the attic. The furniture is stacked and covered in a shroud of dust in the garage next to old yearbooks and deflated sports equipment.

I am not the transformed butterfly I thought I was six years ago. I am more of a snake, shedding successive skins as I slowly stretch and as scales brighten. Or maybe I am a blossom that dies to become a fruit that rots to reveal a seed that is swallowed by the earth and waits in darkness to finally sprout and grow into an firmly anchored tree. Metaphors aside, I am waiting for the dramatic turning point when my true life is revealed, when I finally free of the struggles of metamorphosis.


I interviewed a man for an article on hardship and homelessness this week. At 68, he still drives his motor home in continuous circles through the valley. Unable to settle into a neighborhood, he is restless and searching for the wife and daughter lost to him in a labyrinth of mental illness. His large eyes watered and his gravelly voice slowly recounted his story. He wasn't in a hurry; he had realized that in many ways we relive the theme of our lives over and over again, haunted and trailed by hurts we can't let go of. He drives away from people but knows he will return. His journey has no real destination just the continued motion of living. When his motor home breaks down, he recycles it and buys another used one that will last for a few years. A new vehicle, same traveler.

As much as I would like to believe that I am different from him, that I really do leave things behind in the trash, that I stand naked and new after each skin is shed, I know it's not true. There are memories deeper than paper and skin that survive each change. I am like a person who has been in multiple car crashes and can no longer feel the ease normal people feel when they get behind the wheel. Other people don't have the sound of screeching tires and crunching metal to carry with them on each trip. They exist in the blissful reassurance that car crashes happen to other people, not to them. I am the crash victim except my body is my vehicle, the sight of my near fatal accidents. In the mirror as I dry off after a shower, I see the dents and scraps, the hole where my rib was removed, the scars across my chest, each embedded with memories of pain and fear. Each twinge and developing lump, brings on the fear of hospital rooms and IV poles. These scars, among others, can't be shed or lost in transformation.

I am also trying to leave behind this ridiculous desire to be a writer. That path seems as winding and futile as the homeless man's loop. Yet, the dream haunts me even though I have thrown out the pages it was recorded on. I've tried to conform my hopes to other futures but I am plagued by my characters as the homeless man is followed by the memory of his daughter. He sees her face in that of the drug-addicted girl crying on the curb. People pop up from my past to push me on with whispered praise.

I can still see the journals struggling to free themselves from the garbage bag. The memory comes as I see pictures of graduates throwing up their caps and raising their arms as if to take flight with their freedom. My brothers, the twins, will pack up their rooms like so many grads at the end of the summer. They will throw things away and leave others behind.

I want to tell them not to worry, that in life we are never truly naked and new. The people they thought were unimportant or permanently confined to the past will reappear again in supermarket aisles, in writing clubs, and in foreign cities. Everything will be recycled back into their lives one way or another. Although we are the authors of our own lives, we will discover motifs appearing unbidden in our drafts. I want to tell them that they don't need to seek their future, that it will hunt down in a dogged pursuit.

Even at birth, we come with a legacy and we cut cords that never really break. This life would be unbearable if we ever were granted those new beginnings and feelings of finality we sometimes wish for. Like furniture that keeps reappearing, journals whose word-images live on even as their pages are ground into pulp for blank pages, and lost loves who come back in dreams, we have too much weight and impact to emerge new.

A woman in the check-out line yammering on to the clerk about her finally published novel, makes me laugh at my own vanity in believing my plight was ever new, individual, or aimed toward an ultimate destination. I can shed and trash all I want but I am part of a larger narrative, told over and over again, themes never really deviating despite the alteration of details. The aspiring novelists keep sitting at their windows trying to defeat their self-doubt, the homeless men keep driving in lonely circles trying to find or forget the broken people they loved, and the graduates keep searching for the illusive real world and its promised freedom after each successive cap toss. In these ways, we are never finished, never complete, never fully healed, and never new. As mixtures of constancy and change, we are always alive.