There was nothing ornate about it. It was just smooth faux-leather, not any bigger than the notebooks she had used for school. She cracked it open, hesitantly rolling her thumb over the page corners. It was lined, as she knew it would be, and she wondered whether she'd stick to those lines. She'd heard, of course, about the people who didn't, cramming words into margins or fitting two or more lines of livelihood between the faint gray, preordained lines of the paper. Though it was taboo, she had always a**umed everyone did it. At least every once in a while.
She opened the journal to the middle and used the heel of her palm to flatten the center crease against her desk, hoping to break in the stiff spine a bit, then turned back to the inside front cover.
NAME:
The only space in the journal where there was, and ever would be, a word that she did not put there herself. She picked up her pen, then wrote her name as neatly as she could, as though she was crafting her best first impression:
Maxine Keegan
And in that moment, Maxine felt five things: excitement for her future, relieved to be done with school forever, grateful that her handwriting was decently small, pleased that her printed name appeared casual, and fear for her impending d**h.
“Everyone gets intimidated their first time,” Ms. Norben had told the graduating cla**, “It's perfectly normal to feel anxious or pressured when you first sit down with your journal. That's why we recommend you start off by writing some basic facts about yourself. Ease into it. And remember: you have a week, a week and a half at best, to write things in your journal before they fade completely from your mind.” The entire cla** paid rapt attention, a phenomenon that had been occurring more and more frequently in Ms. Norben's cla** as graduation drew closer. The cla** actually mattered now.
In the past, Ms. Norben's journal cla** had always been something of a joke. Reciting the laws, turning in practice journal entries, re-reciting the laws, and sometimes listening to the stories about crazy people who made the laws necessary. Maxine's favorite was the one about the man who never wrote in his journal. He was 349 years old before the government shut that stint down. What Maxine found most intriguing, though, was how the man had lived without making any memories. It seemed so sad. Immortality surely wasn't worth living with no real friends or family. Maxine couldn't help but imagine what the man had written. She supposed a lot of people wondered about what everyone else wrote, though. Looking in someone's journal was highly illegal. Even the act of asking about what someone else had written was ineffable. In any case, the law now required everyone to write at least a page every two weeks.
Maxine's anxiety reached its tipping point. She felt the weight of her life on her shoulders as she wrote:
I'm shy. I'm not an athlete. I got good grades in school. I would like to work in a library. I have dark hair and freckles and hazel eyes. It takes me a long time to form thoughts and opinions and I often have difficulty finding words to describe how I feel. I am not extraordinary in any way.
Seeing how little space she had taken up in her journal, Maxine felt relieved. There was so much room to write; the end of her journal was ages away. She would live a long life with plenty of memories.
***
Months later, Maxine had taken up training at her local library branch. She spent her free time with her small circle of friends or going for walks. She liked to visit an old field she had often played in growing up, a field with a single huge oak tree in it. She'd grown accustomed to writing in her journal every few days or whenever she felt she really ought to remember something specific. Today was one of those days:
I never thought I'd be writing about this topic. I had long ago accepted that I was meant to be alone; I've never particularly needed anyone in my life. I mean, I have a handful of friends, but they alone satisfy my need for interaction. I'm nothing special… I guess what I'm getting at is that I never expected to have a strong romantic interest in someone. I had crushes growing up, but they all seemed petty compared to the books I liked to read, and so I just kind of let them go. But today. Today I met a boy named Felix and I can't seem to shake him from my mind. He came in to the library and we talked for almost an hour. AN HOUR! I can barely keep a conversation going with my friends for more than a few minutes. It has to mean something, right? He has short, light brown hair and eyes that start out brown by the pupil, then are green in the middle, and then are blue on the outside. His eyes are so beautiful.
***
Felix returned to the library the day after. Then he returned the day after that. And for three more consecutive days. He and Maxine chatted about their favorite books, laughed over scenarios they had come up with together, and genuinely got to know each other. Their minds seemed to work in exactly the same way.
After a week of hanging around the library together, Maxine felt compelled to ask him to go for a walk with her sometime. She would write that night about how strange it was, to feel compelled to interact with a person instead of dreading it. This was her time, she would write, she was growing to know and express herself by becoming close to another person. It didn't make sense to her, but she wasn't fighting any part of it.
On a sunny Saturday in early November, Maxine and Felix walked to Maxine's old field. It wasn't so cold that they need wear more than a sweater or light jacket. The trees in the town still showed their fall colors.
Without thinking, Maxine walked straight up to the oak and sat in the crook in the side of its ma**ive trunk immediately upon arriving to the field. Felix followed and sat haphazardly beside her, almost close enough for their shoulders to touch, but not quite.
Maxine told him about all the times she'd come here as a kid. She would sit under the tree and read and look up from her book to imagine the scenes playing out right there before her. Sometimes she'd even come up with her own stories and watch them in the field where the air, she felt, was heavy with imaginative potential.
Felix scooted away from the trunk so he could look Maxine dead in the eye when he said, “You're pretty amazing.” Somehow Maxine managed to hold his beautiful gaze and not reveal any of the unrest that was exploding in her head and chest. “I think you are, too,” she replied, still managing to keep her facial expression under control, serene and sincere. “I think it's both pretty clear that we like each other,” Felix said, looking down then hesitating and glancing up to see Maxine nod, prodding him to finish his thought. “But I'm going away for school in a month.”
Maxine nodded again. This wasn't news to her. Where was he going with this?
“I don't think it be smart for us to start anything now, and I want to be upfront about that. I don't want to string you along at all. But at the same time, I'm not saying we don't have a future together.” Felix started absent-mindedly pulling at the gra**. “Something might happen in the future, or maybe nothing will. I don't know. Am I making any sense?”
Maxine nodded again. Not only was Felix smart and beautiful and nice, he was gallant! He was remarkable! “Of course,” she said coolly, “Don't worry about me.”
That night, Maxine recorded every single detail of the day she'd had. She took up three entire journal pages in doing so. But it was worth it, she'd want to remember this when she and Felix got married years from now. After he'd gone away and come back and they'd be together and everything would be wonderful. Maxine had never felt as happy or as self confident as she did that night.
A few days later, Felix was gone.
***
Almost a year pa**ed. Maxine thought of Felix every day. She would go sit under her tree and rehash the conversation they'd had there, feeling the rush of joy she'd felt all over again. She was amazing, he'd said. She'd imagine conversations they could have over mundane things, and yet they wouldn't be mundane at all when she had Felix there to talk with. She recorded these things in her journal. She wanted to be sure that she would remember every detail so she could tell Felix all about everything when he came back.
And then Felix came back.
He walked into the library one late afternoon in September. Maxine had to double check that the boy fit the description of Felix she had written in her journal about three times before running up to him- she'd made the mistake of recognizing him in other random customers before. He wore a light leather jacket and a blue checkered, collared shirt tucked into slacks. Fancier than she remembered, but maybe she just hadn't written about his style of clothing in her journal as much as she had about everything else.
“Felix?” She called from behind him. Felix turned to look at her. “Felix!” Maxine was elated. She'd waited so long to see Felix again, she had so much to share with him, she couldn't wait for the two of them to be together for real. And yet…
“Yes?” Felix looked confounded. Maxine faltered. She was two feet from him. She had expected open arms, an embrace. He just stood there. No emotion. No recognition. Maxine had never thought- It had never occurred to her that he might- And yet it was written clearly in his expression, how clearly he had not bothered to write about Maxine in his journal.
***
How many pages of her life had she wasted on him? How could he tell her she was amazing and not bother to remember her at all? How could her make her feel like she was actually worth love and companionship and think so little of it?
Maxine had never been so embarra**ed in her life. All she wanted to do was erase the last year from her journal, to forget it completely. It was impossible. She would always remember and always feel the sting of the lack of recognition she received from Felix in return. Maxine wrote in her journal:
‘Nothing' and ‘hope' are exactly the same thing when you have nothing before you have something, because at that point, all you do is sit around hoping to feel anything. When you have this nothing, you dream about the good things you will feel when your time comes and that hope explodes in your chest and makes you think of nature scenes like a hummingbird s**ing nectar from a flower in full bloom or how the stars must look at night from the gra**y hill in an area where Starbucks and Walmart are scarily foreign concepts, or that special time of evening when the sun is setting at just the right angle and the trees look like they're on fire set in front of the unlit, dull, blue clouds above them.
The nothing you have after having something that goes away, however, is just empty.
***
It was familiar. The bark welcomed Maxine back like it was an old friend draping a blanket over her shoulders as she sat down. The bark was soft here, cork-like from all the sitting she'd done here before. She wondered what had happened here that she had failed to write about. Was she capable of doing to someone else what Felix had done to her?
What Maxine did remember was the way the tree had looked back in the winter. Barren branches holding strong against the snow heaped upon them. And in the fall, all its leaves were yellow and she had sat where she always did and she had worn her yellow sweater that matched the color of the leaves by coincidence and she had looked out at the meadow before her and thought of all the possibilities it presented. She had been so young. That's why the memories were so clear.
She had imagined a horse bounding over the hill right up to the lone tree. It would probably whiny and then subtly bow towards her, clearly a gesture that she was welcome to ride away on the horse's back. In such a situation, she had imagined, she would stand, slowly approach the horse, pet it, try to feed it some gra** that she would pull from the lush ground (it's not like there was anything else in the vicinity she could offer). Now she tried to imagine. She looked at where the horizon took its downturn and she tried to picture a wild horse rounding the hill and galloping towards her. Of course, she could come up with the picture in her mind, but now it lacked emotion.
Sapped of emotion, nay, robbed of it, Maxine sat at the base of her tree. Who did she have to blame? No one, there was no one she could blame and so the blame fell to her, but was that right? It wasn't just. She looked up. During her younger years, there had been a robin's nest on one of the lower branches. She remembered it as clear as anything. Twigs meshed and bent together. The incessant squawking of the babies once they had hatched drove Maxine away from her tree for weeks. She didn't get to see them fly. They were gone when she came back.
The branches were still too high to reach. There would never be any climbing of this tree done by humans. Only the bugs, birds, and squirrels were so privileged. All Maxine could do was look up and try to get a glimpse of sky through the thick foliage or look down. Gra**. Dirt. The occasional dandelion. Had she come here before now and after her last journal entry? There was no concrete way to know. Maybe she'd made this exact trek out here yesterday. Had she decided to be done with the journaling? Would every day from this point on be another day of internal debate and concluding not to write? No, she needed to solidify her memory again.