Left Behind

I wish now that I had brought my journals with me to college. There's seven plus years of my life stored away in those cheaply bound, messily smudged pages, seven years that I was willing to leave behind back in August when I began to pack for Harvard. I packed in in spurts essentially: loading and unloading my two suitcases with clothes and pictures and random trinkets, letting myself get more and more flustered as I tried to decide what parts of my Tennessee life were necessary to bring with me to the far-off northern mecca that was Boston.

I ended up making a lot of poor packing choices, bringing hot sauce and plates but no utensils, stuffing the sides of my suitcases with colorful socks but neglecting to bring any long underwear... my thought processes were jumbled, I wasn't quite there in the packing process I guess, lost as I was in the last sweet days of summer. When it came time to decide whether I wanted to bring all my journals with me I decided against it. I reasoned that I was making this grand leap forward in my life and education, and to bring my journals was to dwell foolishly in the past. I would be strong and unsentimental and just leave them behind. It was a moment of closure in a way, physical proof of the benchmark I wanted to cleave into my life at this time.

But now.... ten weeks into my Harvard experience, I feel slightly foolish. I've come to realize that there's a difference between moving on and giving up your past. The two actions aren't mutually exclusive. Indeed, as we've been discussing in class, manifestations of our past color our present and future whether we wish them too or not; memory and self are inextricably tied. I can leave my journals behind, but memory still shadows my thoughts and actions, patiently, assiduously.

What I left behind at home then is a physical evocation of my nostalgia. My journals serve as tool to organize years and years of built up sensation; in a sense, they bring a tenuous order to my unruly thoughts as they progress through time, imposing words and enumerations and dates upon the fractal images that haunt my mind. There's a dynamic tension there as well, a sense of time (the dates, the seasonal shifts in tone, the disconnected plot of mundane moments) that is beautiful to me, reminding me that this is where I come from, that my perception lies at the crux of all these movable pieces of time and that my memory is what drives this narrative forward.

I miss the sensation of leafing through an old journal, the sense of wonder you get when you read something you penned so long ago you feel detached from the voice behind those words, and then you know that the intervening time has changed you, that each moment in between has knocked you slightly off course, led you down a thousand side paths and brought you here, where the present feels so real and the past like a sepia-toned dream.

I miss that tactility I guess, how I could use old entries as a jumping-off point for my nostalgic reflections, how when I read my thoughts from say March 25th 2007 I could almost still remember the feeling of writing those words, what emotions were thronging the spaces of my mind, my physical condition, the state of my spirit--all these things that I otherwise probably would've lost.

Without my journals, I feel like I'm just groping in the dark.