Stealing moments

it’s been so long since i’ve written, and i always hated starting pieces like that. it sounds too much like confession. reader, forgive me for i have sinned. it’s been seven days since my last entry.

i kept meaning to steal a moment to write. frightening, really. i’d wake up to christmas songs on K-EARTH 101 / doris day’s laughter on AMC / rustling leaves and howling wind / the ding-dong of the doorbell and words that i can only guess were running through my head all the while would come to a screeching halt and stand there, waiting. oh, i must write this down, i’d think, and then i’d roll over and fall back asleep.

even my journal has become less of a place to write and more of a place to put things. recently taped onto the pages: two tickets (from two days) to this american life live at UCLA, a ticket to the american ballet’s production of cinderella, and eight incriminating iZone photos taken at two holiday parties. (of them, not me. i’d show them to you, but that wouldn’t be very nice.) words scribbled: 0.

tonight, i bought a new pen, hoping it would inspire me. why do i fool myself so?

my room is starting to look like somebody actually lives here. i spent the day upacking the last of the boxes, which contained mostly picture frames and candles and books. seeing everything laid out on my floor, i celebrated a moment of panic. i am becoming my mother, i thought to myself, just hours after laughing at her for filling the house with so much stuff. it wasn’t so much an epiphany as a red flag. immediately, i began to throw some of the candles and frames back into a box of things to donate to someone, somewhere. it’s just baggage, i said to myself. it’s just a bunch of things that you will forget ever existed.

but then, of course, there are the CDs and books. those are the things you keep. the pages you dog-ear and mark with colored ink. the songs you play on repeat and sing with your door shut. once, they were someone’s hard work. now, they are your treasures. and is there anything as beautiful as carefully arranged books and CDs? no, there is not. the clean, vertical lines shine like a cityscape on my shelves.

someday, i think, i will be a skyscraper on somebody’s bookshelf. someday, maybe. but today, there’s this.

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