the way I want to remember it

Sometime during the fall of 2003, I stumbled across my Uncle's journal. You're probably thinking, "Yeah, 'stumbled' is right." Well if you must know, the story goes, while encouraging me to catalog the books I've read, my uncle shared with me his own testament to self-edification (title, author, date read) housed in the unlined pages of his journal. As I approached the end of the list and the bottom of the page, I turned it, expecting a continuation. Instead, however, I found an awesomely alluring bit of poetry. The first indication, though, that my uncle had not intended it to be a "poem" was the rather unpoetic formatting. The second was the date that possessively hovered above the text like a title. It couldn't be a letter because it wasn't addressed to anyone, though it definitely had a sense of audience. It began something like, "I was so ready to love her...." I won't risk doing his words a disservice by attempting to recreate the rest of it from memory, but the gist was a conscious vulnerability with a recent crush. It was most certainly a journal entry, either inspired by or written on the date with which it was apparently associated. It was beautiful, laden with tension, longing, unrequited— He snatched it out of my hand.

"Don’t read that."
“Did that really happen? Like that?”
“Maybe.”
“You made it up?”
“No. I just told it the way I wanted to remember it.”
“Did this even happen on that day?”
“I don’t remember. I guess it did.”
“Well, is a journal fiction or non-fiction?”
“You decide.”

Not to be over dramatic or anything, but I literally changed the way that I journal that day. An account, my account, I often found boring to recall, tedious to write, and rarely worth rereading. But a story—now that has the makings of something artful, full of characters, conflict, and most importantly artistic tension.

Basically, this is roundabout way of explaining my blog. This is my life. But also, insofar as it is a story I consciously succumb to the inevitability of perspective and tell it the way I deem it worth remembering.