I've never hated a writing assignment more than this one. I can easily type out two to three pages of how literary devices affect the mood of a story, but a memoir about an event in my life is extremely difficult. Maybe it's because my ideas don't feel important enough to fill two pages. There isn't really anything that's worth it to me. It could be the fact that it's 10:32 at night and I'm sitting criss-crossed on the floor of my bedroom flipping through years of half-empty diaries looking for something to write about. This truly sad attempt at writing that upsets me to a point where I want to give up. I'm reading old journals, ones filled with entries scrawled about how much I hate 5th grade and updates on my latest crush and I am truly disappointed. My vocabulary was lacking and my spelling was atrocious, but the 5th grade me didn't care. I didn't care because I loved the smooth detailed covers and the fresh lined paper that seemed to call my name. I knew they would never get filled to the brim with constant paragraphs about my life because that didn't matter to me. All that mattered was that I was able to write my jumble of growing feelings into books that wanted to hold them. I'm reading my favorite journal. It was my favorite not due to the contents, I could really care less, but because it was brown leather, bound with twine and said simply on the front, "journal" Now looking at it, I feel like I ruined it. I graffitied up the pages with stories no one wanted to hear. I tattooed my signature almost a thousand times on each page and ruined the inside cover by trying to replicate the font on the front. I always wish I could go back to tell myself not to doodle in the margins or pull the strings out of the bind, but that wouldn't have been as much fun. Because it's all these pictures and scribbles that tell me who I was as a fifth grader. I wasn't a 'stay in the lines' girl, I didn't enjoy coloring the grass green just because nature said so. In my drawings, the trees were always plum purple and the grass was always my favorite shade of blue. I'm not straight lined, perfect angled human. I write memoirs about nothing because it's what I'm feeling right now and it might not be a memoir either. Maybe it's another entry for the diary titled, "High School" or maybe it's simply everything I'm thinking that happens to include a reflection on my younger self. It frustrates me that this is how my brain works- constantly making connections to nonsense while trying to reconnect them back to the subject I started with. So, if I could go back, I would tell my 5th grade self to keep finding the magic in those journals that help to express all of the tumbling feelings. I would tell myself to never stop looking for the purple tree in the forest no matter how good it is at hiding and never stop pulling apart the halves of the journals because nobody ever does. I would tell myself to never be afraid to write memoirs about nothing because, amidst all the nothingness, you learn who you are.
