Last month I had my work bag stolen from my car, which contained a laptop and a few other personal effects. Most of the stuff was replaceable or had little value, so it didn’t feel like a colossal loss until I remembered a journal I kept was in there too. It was a journal I started when I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child in which I documented significant milestones in the pregnancy, the birth of our child, our scare in the NICU, what it meant to be a father, how inspiring my wife’s strength is, and all of our baby’s firsts up to his eight months before I lost the journal. I called it Little Memories. The name signifies documenting the journey and growth of our baby. Still, most of all, it was to help me remember all the small details of the past year as my memory is notoriously unreliable. I wanted something to bring me back to any given day over the last year to recall any small achievement our baby accomplished or how awful I felt the next morning after sleepless nights. Bringing it with me daily to work felt like keeping a pocket-sized, sentimental part of my baby boy everywhere I went. They were short, mundane journal entries to anyone else, but meaningful core intimate reflections that I hoped to relive years later at the flip of a page. They were memories that I hoped to pass down to my child, so he could one day have the ability to vividly recount an experience in which he was the main character but would have no existing recollection. It’s not lost on me how silly it even sounds to say it, but losing my notebook felt akin to losing part of myself. These memories feel like a hazy dream that I am clinging to, desperately trying to remember, but all the details keep changing the more I try to recall them. I honestly wish I could start over and rewrite them, but these once hyperspecific details are illegible scribbles etched in the walls of my brain. Attempting to go back to rewrite them would merely be like writing fiction. Ultimately, I hoped these journal entries would forever serve as a testament to my pride in my son and an unending love letter to my wife, but now they don’t belong to anyone, and they’re starting to fade from my memory. I’ve become emotionally enveloped in this material loss, and any closure at this point seems impossible. Suddenly everything in my life feels extra fragile. Like I can lose everything I love in an instant. The silver lining of this experience is that it has given me some new perspective on attempting to live more in the moment and a reminder to love the people and things I can hold right now. Still, I’ve always been a sucker for nostalgia, and like these precious memories, this journal now only exists in the past. I don’t exactly know why I’m writing this or who it’s for, but I’ve found myself incapacitated by a state of arrested development, yet the world keeps going.
