[completed] [about 9000 words]
August 2019
This is the first Wattpad story created from the teenage journals of JE Cuchaço, who grew up for a while in Kentucky, before moving on after high school and college. If you've ever listened to the Mortified...
Since the age of 12, I've kept a journal. My English teacher in 7th grade, Ms. Simms, made it part of our daily classroom routine. Either the beginning or the end of the period was spent writing in our journals. She never read them, never asked to see them. She instilled in us a desire to commune with our deepest thoughts, and capture the moment with perspective and emotional glue.
She actually said things like that, "commune with your thoughts" and "emotional glue." The reality, however, was way different. At least for me.
Like the majority of seventh grade boys, my life was transitioning at the speed of hormones, which —as is known by every male fortunate enough to survive his puberty— could take a guy from sleepy to horny faster than Barry Allen can get to CC Jitters on his morning run. This meant that on Monday I might write about my three dogs and wanting to be part of the mission to colonize Mars, but on Tuesday I might write about a fantasy situation in which I rescue one girl or another from a wildcat attack. Or, living as we did in Kentucky, that might have been a wildcat strike.
I didn't start writing about boys until later.
By the time I made it to senior high, my one-a-day habit grew to two, sometimes three pages per day. As you would expect, these later texts express more detail about situations and plans than those from the early years.
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Last summer a call came. Mom had died. No, it wasn't expected. Yes, thank you for your condolences, but no thoughts and prayers necessary—at least, if you listen to my dad.
After I hung up, I rushed to my boyhood home —but I guess my dad didn't expect that, either. I tried to help without dredging our past for new arguments. I ended up cleaning out my old room and helping him sort through all the strings that tie one person to another, or to a home, or to a life.
One of the more pleasant surprises from that was a dingy old box marked "The Most Personal and Private Journals of J.E.C."
Yeah, go ahead and slap that nerd label on my back; I'll wear it with pride. But I still write a journal entry every day and it's all Ms. Simms' fault. I'd have sworn that The Box was with me in my Big City Apartment, as I like to call it, yet here it was in my old closet. Odd.
Odder still, even though I work with near-religious fervor on writing these things, I've never gone back and read anything I've written. That is, I hadn't up until the day I found The Box. And even then I was too busy to do anything but glance through and feel their pull on my life.
Apparently I had boxed up my journals from grades 7–12 before leaving home. They were packed in a copier paper box that I probably got from my mom's office. I'm guessing I was worried about intruders into my private thoughts, because I'd gone to the trouble to lash together each year's spiral-bound notebooks with thin twine. And there they were, still tied up like that.
There were two notebooks for seventh grade, then three from eighth grade, and so on until I finished with nine notebooks during my senior year. These were then enshrined in the heavy cardboard box, securely taped to keep out all forms of six-legged and eight-legged intruders before stacking among a mass of other boxes that held trophies, camping gear, Boy Scout stuff, and other boyhood collectibles.
