Not so fleeting

I used to journal a lot. My previous life was one of a solitary nature, and it was very conducive to long periods of writing -- blog posts, essays on movies I used to watch all by myself at home on my computer, notes on the novels and other books that I used to read voraciously, drafts of stories that I would leave unfinished, and journal entries that would go on and on, page after page after numbered page.

 But my life has taken quite the drastic turn. I no longer live in solitude, and I no longer spend countless hours indoors in the company of my books and my papers and my movie files. Love has taken me out of the shadows and wide, polished hallways of my writerly life into the open fields and open skies, into the sun and wind and rain. We often get out of bed early in the morning, have breakfast, and then ride out with our gears and guns and boots to wherever the action is waiting, spend the day with family and good friends, and go home late at night, exhausted and happy, and tumble into bed breathless with stories and memories of yet another tremendous day. No two days are ever the same, and every single precious minute is packed with something happening, something to see, something to hear, something to share.

 That doesn’t leave much time and space for contemplation and quiet moments of writing. But being the creature of habit that I am, and always needing to put something, anything, down on paper, I compensate. Now my journals are bursting at the spines with what is officially classified as ephemera: receipts, notes on scraps of paper, ticket stubs, leaves and petals and even soil samples from whatever terrain we have just been to. Sometimes I write one-liners, sometimes I don’t. But I no longer write down words upon words of thoughts as they come to me in my experience of my days.

 At times, when I get some rare pockets of quiet and alone-ness, I wonder if this is a good thing. After all, one of my professors quietly, off-handedly, but quite memorably -- for me, at least -- said to the class, “Memory is a tricky thing; that’s why it’s so important to journal.” And I of the delicate, unreasonable, madcap memory felt my heart break at the truth of that.

 But then again I see myself now, with about 180 pages of volume 38 of my journal filled with more ephemera than words, and I look at my days in the great outdoors with the man I have chosen and who has chosen me, and I feel my heart slowly mending itself, not with words written down on paper but with words uttered, with time shared, with laughter and hugs and kisses, with sun and wind and rain, as our bright and monumental days carry us through our present and towards our future. I rest in the faith that out of these days, an epic story will one day be written by little me, just a bit older, with skin a tad darker and hair with a little bit more white in it, empowered to write more magnificently by the days and months that I did not write.