Journal Pages

I continue to scribble away in my journals and notebooks, to no end, with both satisfaction and a lack of it. I am recording for posterity and also trying to survive these chaotic and intense months and seasons and years. It goes fast! I am blinking and with each blink a child has done something miraculous or terrible, the world spins faster and I have no idea how to cling on. Both Caleb and Naomi created Mothers’ Day cards where there were no children but pictures of Goose, Chicken, and Tuna. My existential crisis deepens as I wonder how my children view my priorities and also when Badiali’s will open up the street from us.

Also I enjoy tremendously the feel of my pen on the page. I have been inking up fountain pens and there is just this shimmer of thrill as the ink is trailed out onto the page, but I’m also enjoying some gel pens and pencils, and part of the spill onto the page is just the sheer pleasure of the smoothness of lines curling and swirling about. The very thinnest threads of my life within my control, and I will take it.

So I am in my journal pages, when I can manage it. It always feels so freeing to feel the words slip out of the hurricane winds in my mind and onto the page, as though I’m no longer responsible for holding onto them. I sometimes contemplate if burning the journals after I fill them would truly release these random and anxious thoughts into the universe forever, but then I realize that you can only overanalyze the make believe so far before you really start spiralling, and that at some point you just have to cap your pen and stand up from you desk and squeeze the little turkeys with their sticky fingers and tattling and glee and unfinished homework projects.

Real life continues, sour and tangy and bright and sweet, and sometimes you’re biting into celery instead of pineapple in sweet and sour pork, and sometimes it’s the Sour Patch Kids that you know your actual kids will never floss out from between their teeth. But we remain committed to turning our faces up to the sun and the clouds and we drink the sweet tea, and we do what we can while we can, for it only lasts so long.