The Journaling Room

Written September 8 2019

This is one of my early unpublished writings about a space between lives.

I shared it with a few very close friends in 2019 and then forgot I wrote it. When I stumbled on it in my notes today, I felt a spark of life - a feeling that there’s so much more to explore. But, before that, I felt the urge to delete entire sentences, revise, and “improve” it before publishing.

More on that after the story…

The Journaling Room

A man sits at a wooden desk with a journal, looking straight ahead intently as snippets of his life scroll by: pictures, videos, and vignettes. Sounds of laughter, tears, and ambient noise fill the room in equal measure. As the scenes play, his pen glides over the page patiently, swooping down like a seabird before it rises to hover again.

Some of the memories are bright and overflowing with joy, inspiring the man to break into a favorite song or lean back in laughter. Others he puzzles over, bobbing his head side-to-side like a detective peering into a stranger’s window at dark. There is also pain: terrible memories that suck the air from his lungs and leave him on the floor for days. He always gets up, eventually, to begin scrolling again.

Time goes by. A lot of time. He knows by now that the pen never runs out of ink and that the journal will decide when to stop offering new pages. With each memory that passes, he struggles with the urge to revise; to take liberties in bending the lies and the truth that his annotations are meant to lay bare. The moments are distant, more vibrant than he remembers, and full of details he missed: a smiling face glancing at him, mouth opening to speak as he turns his back. A child tugging on his arm as he finishes the dishes, lost in reverie or stewing about an argument at work. He can’t be expected to remember how his heart felt or what his mind thought all those years ago….but sometimes, every few weeks, he can feel them again.

The bursts are what keep him going: memories where he can feel a heartbeat, the rise and fall of breath, or his toes wiggling in a pair of new socks. The emotion doesn’t matter: love, jealousy, rage, desire, sadness; he relishes them all. Coming off one of these vivid moments, he turns to a new page to find a familiar prompt:

My name was ____
I lived a life.
I am released.
I will join again.

He lets out a relieved sigh and fills in the prompts, scribbling eagerly and with flair. Before lifting the pen from the paper, he pauses on the final stroke, ink rushing out, bleeding deep into the page. After some time passes, he lifts the pen and caps it with a satisfying click. The scenes have stopped playing and the room is quiet now.

The man claps the hardbound journal closed with one hand and rises from the chair, stretching his arms and the book high above his head. He walks to the bookshelf and drags his finger over the bindings - hundreds of leather-bound journals in muted brown, bright red, and midnight black span the row. His finger stops on a small gap between an emerald green book and the edge of the cabinet and makes a new space, sliding his most recent work snugly against the back wall. A deep exhale.

As he pulls his hand gently from the book, he feels the release like a soft hand lifting from his shoulder. When he looks back to the chair, he can’t help but smile. A pink journal lies on the desk; a prancing unicorn glows on the cover. He turns his back to the shelf and opens the journal slowly, breaking the binding with a careful, practiced reverence. On the first page, the pen traces over the words of a new prompt:

“My name is ____”

and she begins to write.

That was my first attempt at exploring the world of The Journaling Room.

As a practiced self-Saboteur, I started writing this full disclaimer at the top of the Post, but decided to move it down here, after the story, to give it a chance at life.

Some of the lines were painful for me to read, with a critic’s eye, thinking “I could do better, today!” or “this is more of a Scene than it is a story!” There is something peaceful about letting these self-critical thoughts wash over you. Acknowledging the self-important ego voices telling you to “re-write it into The Next Great Novel, first, then publish it!” and telling them to stuff it.

After sitting with that, I settled into a feeling of appreciation: that this short story was one of my first starts. I didn’t overthink it, or try to perfect it, because there was no audience in mind, and I was certainly “Not a Writer Yet.” So much of what we read or experience today is an artist’s victory lap, rather than the awkward sputter of an engine turning over. But we all start with turning the key.

So, this is my early sketch at what a story could be, and there’s nothing stopping me from building on this world from here. Hopefully this glimpse at what an early Scene-Sketch looks like can help you move through the self-critical noise, and just see what happens. 🌏