The diaries wanted to be encased in Jell-O. They wanted to be sliced up and turned into paper chains, so they could wrap themselves around a banister for an entire holiday season. They never wanted to stay flat. They wanted to do something else, be something else, before I threw them away in my 20s. 

These were the diaries—not the journals I kept in college and young adulthood. Some of the diaries had rings that bent together so to be joined by a padlock. These ones fancied themselves useful, like they might be great activists in their next career. They could use those rings when chaining themselves to bulldozers or construction fencing or the front gate of the governor’s mansion.

It was never about what they wanted. They had been there for me as a child, and like a child, I threw them away. No, like an adult I threw them away. Who knows best which things need throwing away? My memories did not age like I’m told a good cheddar might. They aged like a chunk of cheddar that bounced under the couch at the party, the one rescued from the dark only when the smell led our way back to it.

The diaries caught what I had to say. The first time I ever called my mother a “bitch” happened in 2D, in gel pen! I tested words and thoughts and slammed the cover shut, to pin them like bugs that happened to crawl across the pages.

I don’t know what bothers us more. Whether we said the right things or whether we kept the right things.

In a London gallery, an entire room was dedicated to an exhibit a woman made from an ex’s breakup letter. She had hundreds of people read it aloud and react, she annotated copies of it and framed them. I walked around inside of a breakup letter.

I don’t think the diaries would have wanted a gallery. And none of this is about merit or quality. But did I give them a chance? Did I break up with part of my past too hastily?

My daughter is 8, and when she got gel pens for her birthday, I bought myself a pack too, to write with. The diaries are gone, but I wonder if the journals would like the chance to go with me. The Egyptians thought they should take it all with them. But that was for use in the afterlife. If it’s the using, the doing, then maybe I should plan to die with a set of blank ones.

Anybody can fill a page, but I can say, I had it, and I didn’t need it. I did it once, and I can do it again. And that’s what they still wanted, the diaries, it’s what they said inside the kitchen trash can, en route to the dumpster, rolled to the curb. We did it once, we could do it again. They bounced along together in their private bubble of a Hefty bag, not knowing that some endings are endier than others, and they chittered to each other We did it. What’s next?