# The Page Where the Heart Speaks Words

# July Flash Challenge Post 1

I always felt things too hard. Jubilation, desolation, triumph, defeat. Anything in between. Embarrassment was always a big one. Mom always said that my heart didn't develop calluses like everyone else's did, and that I'd always feel things that keenly. I never wanted Mom to be wrong, but I could have lived with it on that one.

She was right, though. Even years after she'd died, her prediction was still going strong, and I was still mourning her, even after all that time. Sure, it didn't hurt as much as it had right after. There was no surprised pang, no realization partway through dialing her number, that there was no one on the other end. My brain got used to the fact of her death, even if my heart never did. I wondered if there was such thing as an eidetic sentimentality, the same way they said there was eidetic memory, because time never seemed to heal my wounds. I just forgot they were there.

It wasn't one big thing so much as an accumulation of things that made me look for the book. One day, I was reeling from a cascade of misery, and it made me think of other times I'd been as miserable, and that kind of spiral was a hard one to get out of. It kept getting harder as there was more and more misery in my past.

Finally, I'd had enough. Enough misery, enough elation that I could lose an entire weekend to. I needed something - anything - to let me live in some kind of balance.

One thing you should know about me: What I look for, I inevitably find. It may be persistence, or intellect, or maybe my eidetic sentimentality somehow tuned me into the right channel. Regardless, if I looked for something, it was just a matter of time until it was mine.

The book came into my possession through an unusual channel - a former co-worker came back from abroad and called me up for coffee. Over coffee, I told him about my search and he pulled the book out.

He told me a story filled with hearsay and supposition - an improbable story of him picking it up on a whim. He knew he would have no use for it, but he bought it anyway, even with the price as steep as it had been. This is what I meant about usually getting what I looked for.

The price for me was much steeper than it had been for him. I signed over my motorcycle and got the book in return. I loved that motorcycle, but if the book could do what I was sure it could, it wouldn't matter.

I've always been an avid journaller. It never blunted the raw emotion, but it gave me facts to anchor my feelings to. That kept me tethered to reality.

The book my friend gave me was perfectly set-up. The line spacing was nice and tight without being ridiculous. If you are not a journaller, I doubt I can make you understand how important the distance between the lines is. And I won't try, because it would be a waste of effort. I might as well try to convince you that fountain pens and cursive writing represent the pinnacle of society.

I felt some trepidation as I started my first entry. Some excitement too, but mostly fear. I didn't know what the process would be like, so I started small. A girl in school who had torn up my Valentine and thrown it on the floor. Fine, the sadness and humiliation hadn't been small, but the loss of it was, I thought, something I could survive.

But it didn't hurt. It wasn't torn away from me, leaving a scar. It was a burden lifted from my shoulders. I eagerly wrote on: rejections, insults, minor bumps, small catastrophes, they were all a weight off of me.

I didn't stop at the bad stuff. I started feeling giddy, worrying that I would slip into a kind of mania, so I tried for balance. Getting my first job. Quitting my first job. Getting into college. The time I won MVP in the football championship. They all went in.

It felt like nearly everything went in, and each one of those things made me easier. Removed from the emotion of it, I could see how bad my first girlfriend and I were for each other, and how much courage it must have taken her to break up with me.

Months it took to fill the book, and the ink has just run dry on the final entry. You might think I must be an emotionless automaton now, having signed away any emotional attachment to my life. But I left some things out. Mom, sitting with me, watching Road to Perdition, sobbing our eyes out at Tom Hanks's sacrifice. Arguing with Mom over chores. Laughing with Mom over getting song lyrics catastrophically wrong. Mom dying. Seeing her glare in the annoyed face of my teen-aged daughter.

It had all been too much, but I don't need the book anymore. I don't want to hide from the rest of what this life has for me.