Reading back through my journal entries of cramped handwriting and pen streaks, I’ve realized that I forget more than I can remember. For example, I found an entry where I wrote a note to myself to visit a particular bookstore. Not only did I forget the name of the bookstore I had been dying to go to just a month ago, but I also forgot that I wanted to go at all. That desire burned so brightly that I simply had to write it down, and then it died out so quickly that just a few weeks later, I may well have never heard of the place.
Journaling protects against losing memory. I use it to record descriptions namely anything odd or beautiful that I deem worth remembering. My entries are often one-liners like “penny eyes,” “stars like sugar,” “‘o’ of grandpa’s mouth,” or “sinister birds.” It is a book littered with fragments, a mosaic of my life gathered from unintelligible scribbling in elevators, waiting rooms and the brief, still moments of the day. My notebook also contains snippets of conversations I want to remember.
While working in a coffee shop over the summer, I made friends with Justin, a regular customer with an outlandish salt-and-pepper beard who brought in a leather goblet for me to fill with black coffee every day. We bonded over Bob Dylan, and now, an entry in my notebook reads, “poetry is his instrument.” Another entry consists of a conversation with Eddy, a bellman my mother and I met in New York who dreamed of owning a farm in Texas with horses, chickens and a pack of Great Danes. He found it delightful that Texas has its own pledge and hilarious when I robotically recited it. I wrote down Eddy’s name with the note, “Great Danes in Texas.”
There is a special joy that comes from memorializing these seemingly trivial moments. Writing about the interaction with Eddy in my journal, I put myself in a space to reflect on the moments where I have fallen in love with my home. I can recall the Bluebonnets and Pink Ladies and Indian Blankets on the base of Enchanted Rock and the sunrises over the field in morning field hockey practice, the ones that looked like the sky itself was splitting open and thick fingers of orange and silver were piercing through the clouds.
Journaling is not just a process where your pen hurriedly brushes over the page but where writing is thoughtful and shameless. Your notebook can listen to lamenting and wallowing, the emotional rants too irrational for even your mom and the hazy recollections of dreams that may or not hold any meaning. My notebook is home to the intricacies of my relationship with home: the grief from being a woman in Texas layered over my love for the land, my floppy-eared dog waddling around in high grass and the people I met and love there. It is home to deeply personal, unfiltered entries. My notebook knows about Nonee, my grandmother, and her chunky silver rings, flaming red hair and criminally spoiled dogs. The notebook was there, living and breathing with her life and laughter even when Nonee no longer was.
In college, remembering is all the more important. I want to harbor the love I hold for my home, the images that flash before my eyes, but also the ones that don’t. Some memories exist in my notebook and nowhere else because the pictures have faded from my mind. The words I wrote piece them back together like they never left, repurposed like cut-up magazines to form something incomplete but wholly loved.
I don’t want to forget these beginning days in Boston. I don’t want to forget laying on a quilt under a willow tree in the park, running down Newbury in crashing rain, London Fog nights with steam warming my cheeks or ecstatically pointing out the first signs of yellowing leaves. I want to remember these days marked with insecurity and doubt tentatively opening up to and learning about people who are witty and fun and who have made me laugh until my stomach aches.
The physical act of writing and the mental task of reflecting commits moments to memory. Sometimes, I find myself moving through a day without pausing to think about a single thing that I witnessed or said, forgetting even as I go along. Journaling is a practice to better understand yourself and your interactions with the people and places around you, a way of honoring memories and solidifying them in this moment, keeping them at your disposal forever.