Water Damage

I still have my childhood journals. The first one was a classic black-and-white marbled cover composition notebook, gifted to me at age six by my great-aunt. Some are cloth-covered, some paper. Spiral, glue-bound, unlined, narrow-lined, wide-lined, grid-lined. Dozens, filled margin-to-margin with handwriting still recognizably mine, although like so much else, it was rounder and smoother in my teens and twenties.

Only one is lost, left behind on a bench at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station in 1992, when I ran to catch a train at final call, having missed all previous announcements because I was so absorbed by writing in my journal.

They stopped accumulating when I got my first laptop, turned into chaotic half-formed documents, saved under unfindable names in defunct word processing programs, lost to outdated floppy discs, thumb drives, hard drives, cloud services, the ether, the weather. They have no matter.

And no matter. I never read the old ones, never needed to. The writing that became my external work exists in a different universe. Notebooks I use now, because I still handwrite most first drafts, don’t connect at all to the stacks of journals that hold my youth, adolescent and young adult musings, that felt in those years like the repository of my truest self. There are no gems of brilliance or originality I think I’ll find inside. Yet these are the things I carry. A cardboard box full, moved apartments and houses ten times and two divorces from my thirties into my fifties. It’s the talismanic nature of having them that holds meaning. The lugging of the box. The sense of the box. The box exists, therefore my before-self exists.

In 2022, the box landed in the basement of my partner’s house in Connecticut, shoved in a corner along with clothes and shoes and paperwork and office supplies I might need someday. Waiting while I remade my life in scores of ways.

A once-in-a-hundred year storm with pinpoint areas of up to 15 inches of rainfall swept across the state a year later. Bridges wiped out. Roads wrecked. And the basement, which had never flooded before, sighed and bent and collapsed under the weight of the water. The cardboard box disintegrated. Little notebooks floated in puddles, covers soggy. The smell of wet paper and cloth permeated the air for days.

They’re dried out now, most of the pages gummed together. The few I can pry open have bled ink across the words. They’re mostly unreadable.

I’m not bereft. I don’t clock this as a loss. The journals radiate the same energy for me as they did before. Talismanic, not telltale. It’s all right if they decay. Everything does.

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Water took my father’s life ten years ago. Not a ravaging hundred-year storm, but a still, calm pond on a brilliant, sun-filled, perfect August day.

I’m writing a memoir now that’s in part about his drowning. None of the words I need to tell this story can be retrieved from the sodden pages of my childhood journals; they weren’t in there to begin with. But the child who wrote those words needs to narrate parts of the tale. I’m keeping the journals for her.

I keep a small stone from the pond’s edge too. Just to touch it now and again.

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