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As I have already given way to the habit of quoting from my daily journal on this site, I'd like to whole-heartedly recommend the keeping of one. Our words capture feelings, places, and, most importantly, time in a jar so that we can re-open them again and again, re-living things long lost from the mind's everyday traffic.
I find that I take things for granted much, much too easily. I remember leaving one of the summer music academies two years ago feeling wistful and sentimental. This happens quite a bit with me. When I was young, I became so enamored with the daily activity at church camps that I would become utterly unglued when the time came to go home.
"I remember sitting at the Cafe St. Laurent with all of them. And I remember thinking that this is fun and that I was going to miss it. I knew I was going to miss it. The feeling was so strong. So quick and gripping. So sudden and tragic. At once mawkish and somehow still magical. Silly things became significant and mere tchotchkes became valuable keepsakes. Jang Gun's wooden stick from the forest. Our nametags. The penned graffiti on our doorposts.
I just don't understand life. And why it's so finite. Why my puny brain tries to make things more timeless by being so caught up in it. My brain lends itself to the grueling task of making every little incident that should be merely passing into epic moments of development and drama. It's precisely this reason that camps survive. It's not the outdoors. It's the people and the atmosphere it creates when people of common interests and different backgrounds are somehow orchestrated together, by chance, by God, and interact for an intense period. And, then, having it all somehow forced, against all normalcy, to come to an abrupt end."
In that claustrophobic heat, I consoled myself by bringing up the fact that I would see a bulk of them again.
"At least I didn't get close to the people I may never see again," I wrote. "I think I was closest with my roommate who, it turns out, lives only five minutes away from me. And several of the others go to McGill; I'll see these people again and it's not so sad."
And, then, maybe one of the more insightful things I said that day was when I tacked on, "Actually, it's a little sad because in order for me to feel better, I need to make them less special. Or maybe what's sad is that what makes people special is the chance of never seeing them again."
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