I went back into an old journal this week — April 2003 to February 2004 — for a video Søren, Ashley, and I are making together. I did not expect it to be complicated. It is.
What makes it into our journals and letters. What makes it onto the camera verses the phone? What is printed? What remains in pixels until lost in a swamp or never looked at again. Is it the absence of accuracy that makes a memory or result brighter? Is it the effect of time on the material object or is it our creative memories. The missed shot, the forgotten recording, a word unfound, writing in the dark, a cut out? As for what is captured — a fragment, a sound, a smudge, glued in, handwritten, drawn — they reveal time past in a way we won’t know until we look back.
Looking back has left me melancholic for a time past, for my younger, smoother self. Who did I spend time with? Who else wrote in my journal? There are people still in my life, and others no longer — those hanging on by a thread, or gone from this world altogether. One person was very much alive throughout this journal but gone before I finished, having taken his own life. Gone now from the world, for longer than he’d been in it.
It took a walk, a night, and a reframing to return to the journal with a better perspective. Read the words, Margaux. In going back in, I no longer wanted to edit, erase, or burn my past. There will always be mortifying things, like endless selfies, but with the tiniest bit of reading, I found a girl who traveled and read so many books and encountered extraordinary people and listened to so much music. I am daily reminded that I am just a fleck in the world. Sometimes the grandeur of the tomes feels like a glorification of what’s inside. But I captured in these old pages what I felt was important. Or what I had time for. Or the capacity to understand. It need not be monumental.
And inside the journal, with unexpected pleasure, I found evidence of a game I’d forgotten I knew and played. Words were written on scraps of paper and folded, then three were drawn at random. With those three words, we’d each write a song. I thought this was something I’d learned in an illustration workshop years later, then played with Søren and Silas when they were little, experimenting with writing and drawing stories, and loosening stuck things. But here it was, years before they were even born, already part of my vocabulary.
We carry so much with us, often on unseeable threads.
With Søren’s graduation behind us and his departure to Savannah close, I was psyched to hear he wanted to join us in making videos. First up, finishing some of what I left unfinished in these old pages. As his facilitator Shelia Pai said in her graduation speech, “Anything you share with Søren, has the potential to be a little seed of thought that blossoms into worlds in his journals…” The same is true in reverse. I look forward to seeing what seeds he plants, and how they grow.
What happens, I wonder, if we go back into our past and mingle with it? How are you now, stranger — or not stranger — affected by what I am sharing of a me who had no expectation, in 2003, to share this with anyone who stumbles into this window of modernity. I could not have known you were coming. And yet, here we are.
Loved this. All those threads weaving thru our live - never knowing where they will end or who they will combine with.