diary

The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning.

... so this is for us.This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and loveand this is for doing it even if no one will ever knowbecause the beauty is in the act of doing it.Not what it can lead to.This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playingand no one is around and they will never knowbut I will forever rememberand that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have,and this is for you who write or play or read or singby yourself with the light off and door closedwhen the world is asleep and the stars are alignedand maybe no one will ever hear itor read your wordsor know your thoughtsbut it doesn__ make it less glorious.It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.Infinite.For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe inand only you can decide how much it meantand meansand will forever meanand other people will experience it toothrough you.Through your spirit. Through the way you talk.Through the way you walk and love and laugh and careand I never meant to write this longbut what I want to say is:Don__ try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountainwhere no one will ever hearand your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar.Make your life be your artand you will never be forgotten.

If you're reading this, then I guess someone, somewhere does go through the rubbish and read every piece of paper that gets balled up and tossed away. So in that case here it is- my name's Sal.

If you leave without me, I__l just follow you. You can__ stop me, Cassie. How are you going to stop me?__ shrug helplessly, fighting back tears. __hoot you, I guess.___ike you shot the Crucifix Soldier?__he words hit me like a bullet between the shoulder blades. I whirl around and fling open the door. He flinches, but stands his ground.__ow do you know about him?_ Of course, there__ only one way he could know. __ou read my diary.___ didn__ think you were going to live.___orry to disappoint you.___ guess I wanted to know what happened____ou__e lucky I left the gun downstairs or I would shoot you right now. Do you know how creepy that makes me feel, knowing you read that? How much did you read?__e lowers his eyes. A warm red blush spreads across his cheeks.__ou read all of it, didn__ you?_ I__ totally embarrassed. I feel violated and ashamed. It__ ten times worse than when I first woke up in Val__ bed and realized he had seen me naked. That was just my body. This was my soul.I punch him in the stomach. There__ no give at all; it__ like I hit a slab of concrete.__ can__ believe you,_ I shout. __ou sat there__ust sat there__hile I lied about Ben Parish. You knew the truth and you just sat there and let me lie!

How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along?

It's a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would be a gory, blood-smeared earth.

I was one of those unfortunates adopted by upper middle-class professionals and nurtured in an environment of learning, art and a socio-religious culture steeped in more than 2000 years of Talmudic tradition. Not everyone is lucky enough to have been raised in a whiskey tango trailer park by a bow-legged female whose sole qualification for motherhood is a womb that happened to catch a sperm of a passing truck driver.

Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?

Why should I be sad? Everyone has to die. If you have a body, it's too late to cry. It's only funerals I can't stand.

You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?

I'm sorry. This is diary, not enlightenment.

In looking back now, I see how it began in my childhood, altho_ I was not conscious of the necessity until _67 or _68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end....So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing.

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.

You know, when life presents you only good things and you idealize them to your way.And abruptly it comes up an avalanche of catastrophes and destroys all your beautiful dreams, as a war that destroys an entire country or a volcano that devastates forests.That's how I feel and I write in this diary 'How everything should have been' in my life.

The platonic love I feel for my cousin, made me write this diary ...__eione

Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.

All experiences are stories to be told and must be written.