Migrations

I am going to make a confession, which you will find difficult to believe, but humor me.

I have never kept a Journal.

Incidentally, I just learned that a crankpin is also known as a journal? Fascinating! that is the load bearing part in the crankshaft of an axle. In mechanical complexity, briefly, it has something to do with distribution of Stress. Fatigue causing breakdown, and I know from my Civic DX that you can drive with a broken axle, but not for very long, and should it give out, it would be potentially a fatal crash. That a lesson from years ago. Mercifully everything held up on prayers well enough to trade-in. (Incidentally, my DX was named Kocioł, idiomatically meaning "Chaos.")

Of course, I do carry a notebook. For as long as I can remember it is, aside from my calculator watch, my only accessory. But I have been adamant about not-writing.

My father kept a journal. In the most traditional sense, and it was locked. A thing of beauty, though on the outset nothing more than that everyday spiral ring single or multi-subject schoolthing. When I say it was locked, I mean no one could read it. His handwriting, so distinctive, was in a sort of cursive all caps, and in Polish. And whatever was in there, was by that barrier, safe. Not that I would dream of prying!! I did not. And he felt no need to hide. So, it sat on the table, open, an artifact of Intellect, his Pride.

What I am getting at is that a journal or diary is intensely private.

My sister kept a diary. She wrote practically under the bedsheets her thoughts and feelings about her tumultuous relationships. She fretted over who was mad at who, and with good reason. There was a lot of apologizing, retracting and redacting. Torn pages. Life must have been tough. Internally. I only can say so, again most definitely I would Not dare to pry, because she told me. I asked yes. And even when I didn't. She was so proud of her writing, an accomplishment applauded by elders like a learned trick, that she would occasionally read something aloud and watch for full effect. Adjectives. Flowers. Feelings and colors. Certainly, I listened, and it confirmed for me. I would Never keep a diary.

I would blush in private in horror.

So, what the devil would be in my non journal? well, I compromised. I kept a list.

Occasionally, I encrypted something in the corner, if the date were significant for it. But having capsuled some wording, within a few years, it was a code accessible only as a hieroglyph. If I could not decipher by surrounding doodle, date or to do list, I too could no longer read it. I could read my drawings, though in detail. I could recall for a considerable while after the intense emotion and surroundings that went into those marks. Drawing helped me figure out what I was trying to say... with that said, I have not drawn in years. I have, mostly, lost track of what I was trying to communicate.

I cast no judgement on Silence, nor empty space of margins.

Speaking has been difficult. When I was little, and growing up, I was periodically told that whatever I said sounded like poetry, and that to me sounded so foreign and complicated, and pompous that I'd rather bite my tongue. But I've grown to enjoy the words in my mind, and when I mention now that I write "all the time," it is simply that I script in my thinking, in invisibly personal conversations, parts that sometimes find their way to paper, but mostly, which grow wings and fly South without commitment for coming back.

They do from time to time. Like today, they are here again-- in afternoon shadow.