This Is Not The Greatest Song Ever, This Is A Tribute.
Test for a Journal Entry
This was something that I found in a journal that I had in 1996. I think that it was for the first half of the year. I had forgotten that this was written, not by me but by my then girlfriend. I remember her sitting at my desk writing this, taking time and thought in every word. Perhaps making sure that everything would be crafted so exact that this was more a contract than page stolen from my journal. What was a labor of love was lost to endless amount of books and sketchbooks and journals that occupy my home.
This would be a few months before I slipped a note under the door at WaterMart where I worked explaining to my boss, Henry, that I had to leave for a week. No real reason for the notice, only that it was urgent. Only the following day bording a plane to fly to North Carolina to be for the first time to you, and maybe the only time, a knight in Doc Martens. Driving back accross the country with you. Seeing Nashville, Graceland, Mt. Vernon, Chicago, New Orleans and the Waste Lands that is known as West Texas (you were asleep and I had enough coffee in me to make eyes bug out a little further than Rodney Dangerfield). Only to get back after a being in a car for twenty some odd hours to head to work as soon as we arrived back into town.
3-10-96 Sunday 9:25 pm
I'm stealing a page in someone else's life. Perhaps I've taken even more than that.
You will look back on this page just as you will look back at the piece of your life I have taken. That is, something that happened a long time ago and took up space. If I myself can't always be with you, at least I'll be thought of as long have this journal.
The reason I feel as though I've taken something is that you have given so much. I know your hopes and dreams. I know now how to love. I know what your heart beat feels like, sounds like and how fast it beats. I know the loving touch of your hands and the childlike innocence that surfaces on escalators and staircases. I don't just know all of these things, I love them! I love you, and I thank you for a page in your journal, and in your life.
Love always,
Marisa.
It was something that I haven't probably seen since I finished it (actually... I never had finished it. It still has several pages that are still blank). I doubt that I've even given it another thought since then. It was a meme that had quit working a long time ago.
I've thought about her from time to time. I've heard what she has been doing from mutual friends. Part of me wonders if she remembers what she wrote so long ago on that Sunday back in March of '96. I guess it is a feeling of nostalgia. That feeling that things were good way back when. Always forgetting the reasons why the relationship didn't last.
A large part me hope that she had forgotten that she had ever written that entry. Moved on and
disregarded anything thing that she had ever felt for me. I was a blip in her life. A distant memory like a scene from movie that was watched once and never seen again.
Nostalgia. A idea and a term that can cause misdirected ideas to seem great. Look at the beginning of the last two decades. The nineties had a revival of bell bottoms, something that most people who where alive then didn't want to come back into style. And now, a revival of the eighties where those of us who were alive and cognoscente should remember better that those damn colors were hideous then and twenty years hasn't changed that.
That the same reason that I hope that she doesn't remember. It was special, a revival on that magnitude would only lead to more harm than good.