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Description
       It's terrible what I did, and I know that. I should have just returned the book to her. Steal a girl's diary and watch the processes of her brain work in snapshots. You'll catch glimpses of her life—see the most intimate relationship someone can have with their memory. I read her diary from beginning to end—from the sunrise of her thoughts to that recurring dream she had last night, the one where she kept waking up only to find she was still dreaming.

       She limits how much of herself she'll expose to someone. It's like her eyes specifically go to her friend who always needs advice on what to wear, but she will never let said friend watch her eat. She listens to anyone who needs to fill a pair of ears with complaints, but they will never see her cry. She puts on this real fascinating show for people, comes off as this intriguing as hell person and only lets them see that much. She feeds off of this interest they develop in her, knowing if they get to see any more, they'll just get bored of her. I couldn't stop reading because it was like exploring skin and being obsessed with the touch. But mostly I think her flawed brain is gorgeous; she gradually forgets her life detail by detail the way we forget our dreams when we awake, and that's beautiful. Her memories are pixels falling out of a picture and she is left there staring at fog in the morning on a bus ride to school—pieces of her past, thrown into a swamp.

       She isn't happy; that's for sure. I don't know her name, but then again, I don't really need to know. In a sense, I have a map of her entire being, an intricate drawing of the shapes her mind twists into. It's like watching a beautiful woman get dressed the morning after you made love to her when she doesn't know you're watching.

       So this unnamed girl—from the quick glance I got of her, I didn't really find her physically attractive, but I think that's what makes her beautiful. If she knew of her beauty, she wouldn't feel or write the way she does. No one noticed her when she left the café; I barely did. But I saw that book where she was sitting, and I was going to grab it and quickly return it to the owner before she got away. I'm not normally a nosy person. And it's not even as if the outside of the journal intrigued me, but the spark of an impulse came in through my fingertips; within seconds the rest of my body was in flames. I had to open it. What started out as frantic, urgent scribbles turned into a story I could follow along with. The words stemmed from a girl I could connect with. From that point on, I was hooked. Every coffee's last gulp was colder than the previous coffee as less and less I needed the caffeine to concentrate. Of course it felt awful to read a stranger's diary as if it were some sort of novel. I can compare it to smoking a cigarette: absolutely aware of the damage it's causing, but at this moment it really doesn't matter. And I craved what I'd see on the next page.

       It's the feeling of being locked under your own body, like someone is literally just sitting on you and looking at you as you can't breathe. Do you know what that feels like? To be limited to nothing but the decomposed, rotting shit in your mind that drowns you day in, day out. And you're tired. You're so damn tired. But your eyes are taped open, and you're forced to keep going. I sort of felt like I was reading the saddest letters in the world: dear a man who simply doesn't care; love a girl who feels too much.

       When the café closed for the night, I noticed her running across the street. Immediately my heart did things that made me nervous. Some force pushed me back in a seat that wasn't there but became there, very much so. Breathless, I walked out of the door and approached her. What I saw wasn't a body with physical features. I could only study her face, desperately wanting to know what she was thinking. All I could do was wait for a reaction. It was like seeing nothing but her shadow and having no idea if she was about to cry in panicky fits or if she would jump in my arms. So I waited.

       "Do I know you?" she asked.

       Her face underwent a series of expressions. First, complete confusion. Think of Haruki Murakami when he wrote about being disassembled and then hurriedly put back together, like she had been in a coma and somebody disassembled her memory, and just as they realized she would soon awake, they quickly reformed fragments of her memories back together. Then there was this look of arousal—vague but impossible recognition, a desperate craving to recall memories of me that never happened. Like she wanted to take off my clothes in a completely innocent manner to discover that the voice in her head was right, that the look of this skin coincides with her memories, and now she just wanted a quick peek at someone else's soul, at all the beautiful mysteries people hide under the skin. And immediately this horrible quiet followed. I pictured a massacre that struck the biggest firm in the city—bloody bodies everywhere. The eerie sound of the photocopier still making copy after copy—just enough sound to know that the blood must still be warm and wet. Finally I saw her anger. It was the kind of anger where you'd have to hold down her wrists, where within seconds vases would be shattered into pieces on the floor. She saw what I was holding.

       "So you know my brain," she said, "You know what I look like when I fall to my knees, dirt in my hair. You know how I look when ambulance lights flash across my body. By now you must know my voice is a siren-cry in the middle of nowhere. When you read someone's diary, you walk through a graveyard of all the skeletons they've been. We're never the same person today as we were yesterday." A thorny thought pierced her head, and she let the blood continue pouring: "The quick disappearance of happy thoughts has always confused me, because where the hell do they go? They turn to vapour, but the dull sadness never does that. It never lifts."

       "I was going to return it…I really was—I just…I…couldn't help but open it. And once I started reading, I just wanted to know you. There's no way I can make this sound not creepy—"

       She had this look on her face that told me explaining was stupid and unnecessary, so I stopped. And then, I'm not sure if she was talking to me or if she had some sort of revelation that just needed to be heard. If there was a smooth transition between this look on her face and her next words, I guess I must have missed it.

       "I'm going to major in English," she said, "I'll go to shows all the time, but only the ones where my feet will fucking ache from standing and where I'm close enough to see the beads of sweat on the band's faces. I'll start smoking cigarettes. I'll fall for a man in his fifth year of university who will have no idea what he wants to do after he's done the year. We'll drink red wine and I'll write crappy poetry about the way he pretends I'm another woman when we make love and how my tears fall down his chest. It'll be beautiful, really, but it'll be just miserable. My teacher will hate my writing, but I'll be famous when I'm dead."

       I couldn't help but think this was her staring into a mirror, picking herself apart—a painful process like slowly pulling glass out of your skin. I couldn't help but call this exposure, a naked woman pressing her breasts up against a window for a genuine lover to look at, like in that one Matthew Good song—Prime Time Deliverance or whatever. The girl on display clutching the telephone booth glass—she's cold, desperate, and starving. In this look, I felt convinced that I could travel across her body. I'd find London, England in her touch. Her mouth pressed against mine would take me to a shitty apartment in New York City where we would live, and we'd be too poor to afford a good bed, but we'd be happy nonetheless. I knew saying nothing would make me look boring, but I couldn't think of anything to say to her. I returned her diary and walked away. All I could do was hope she would grab my arm roofed with goose bumps and tell me to stay.

Description
       It's terrible what I did, and I know that. I should have just returned the book to her. Steal a girl's diary and watch the processes of her brain work in snapshots. You'll catch glimpses of her life—see the most intimate relationship someone can have with their memory. I read her diary from beginning to end—from the sunrise of her thoughts to that recurring dream she had last night, the one where she kept waking up only to find she was still dreaming.

       She limits how much of herself she'll expose to someone. It's like her eyes specifically go to her friend who always needs advice on what to wear, but she will never let said friend watch her eat. She listens to anyone who needs to fill a pair of ears with complaints, but they will never see her cry. She puts on this real fascinating show for people, comes off as this intriguing as hell person and only lets them see that much. She feeds off of this interest they develop in her, knowing if they get to see any more, they'll just get bored of her. I couldn't stop reading because it was like exploring skin and being obsessed with the touch. But mostly I think her flawed brain is gorgeous; she gradually forgets her life detail by detail the way we forget our dreams when we awake, and that's beautiful. Her memories are pixels falling out of a picture and she is left there staring at fog in the morning on a bus ride to school—pieces of her past, thrown into a swamp.

       She isn't happy; that's for sure. I don't know her name, but then again, I don't really need to know. In a sense, I have a map of her entire being, an intricate drawing of the shapes her mind twists into. It's like watching a beautiful woman get dressed the morning after you made love to her when she doesn't know you're watching.

       So this unnamed girl—from the quick glance I got of her, I didn't really find her physically attractive, but I think that's what makes her beautiful. If she knew of her beauty, she wouldn't feel or write the way she does. No one noticed her when she left the café; I barely did. But I saw that book where she was sitting, and I was going to grab it and quickly return it to the owner before she got away. I'm not normally a nosy person. And it's not even as if the outside of the journal intrigued me, but the spark of an impulse came in through my fingertips; within seconds the rest of my body was in flames. I had to open it. What started out as frantic, urgent scribbles turned into a story I could follow along with. The words stemmed from a girl I could connect with. From that point on, I was hooked. Every coffee's last gulp was colder than the previous coffee as less and less I needed the caffeine to concentrate. Of course it felt awful to read a stranger's diary as if it were some sort of novel. I can compare it to smoking a cigarette: absolutely aware of the damage it's causing, but at this moment it really doesn't matter. And I craved what I'd see on the next page.

       It's the feeling of being locked under your own body, like someone is literally just sitting on you and looking at you as you can't breathe. Do you know what that feels like? To be limited to nothing but the decomposed, rotting shit in your mind that drowns you day in, day out. And you're tired. You're so damn tired. But your eyes are taped open, and you're forced to keep going. I sort of felt like I was reading the saddest letters in the world: dear a man who simply doesn't care; love a girl who feels too much.

       When the café closed for the night, I noticed her running across the street. Immediately my heart did things that made me nervous. Some force pushed me back in a seat that wasn't there but became there, very much so. Breathless, I walked out of the door and approached her. What I saw wasn't a body with physical features. I could only study her face, desperately wanting to know what she was thinking. All I could do was wait for a reaction. It was like seeing nothing but her shadow and having no idea if she was about to cry in panicky fits or if she would jump in my arms. So I waited.

       "Do I know you?" she asked.

       Her face underwent a series of expressions. First, complete confusion. Think of Haruki Murakami when he wrote about being disassembled and then hurriedly put back together, like she had been in a coma and somebody disassembled her memory, and just as they realized she would soon awake, they quickly reformed fragments of her memories back together. Then there was this look of arousal—vague but impossible recognition, a desperate craving to recall memories of me that never happened. Like she wanted to take off my clothes in a completely innocent manner to discover that the voice in her head was right, that the look of this skin coincides with her memories, and now she just wanted a quick peek at someone else's soul, at all the beautiful mysteries people hide under the skin. And immediately this horrible quiet followed. I pictured a massacre that struck the biggest firm in the city—bloody bodies everywhere. The eerie sound of the photocopier still making copy after copy—just enough sound to know that the blood must still be warm and wet. Finally I saw her anger. It was the kind of anger where you'd have to hold down her wrists, where within seconds vases would be shattered into pieces on the floor. She saw what I was holding.

       "So you know my brain," she said, "You know what I look like when I fall to my knees, dirt in my hair. You know how I look when ambulance lights flash across my body. By now you must know my voice is a siren-cry in the middle of nowhere. When you read someone's diary, you walk through a graveyard of all the skeletons they've been. We're never the same person today as we were yesterday." A thorny thought pierced her head, and she let the blood continue pouring: "The quick disappearance of happy thoughts has always confused me, because where the hell do they go? They turn to vapour, but the dull sadness never does that. It never lifts."

       "I was going to return it…I really was—I just…I…couldn't help but open it. And once I started reading, I just wanted to know you. There's no way I can make this sound not creepy—"

       She had this look on her face that told me explaining was stupid and unnecessary, so I stopped. And then, I'm not sure if she was talking to me or if she had some sort of revelation that just needed to be heard. If there was a smooth transition between this look on her face and her next words, I guess I must have missed it.

       "I'm going to major in English," she said, "I'll go to shows all the time, but only the ones where my feet will fucking ache from standing and where I'm close enough to see the beads of sweat on the band's faces. I'll start smoking cigarettes. I'll fall for a man in his fifth year of university who will have no idea what he wants to do after he's done the year. We'll drink red wine and I'll write crappy poetry about the way he pretends I'm another woman when we make love and how my tears fall down his chest. It'll be beautiful, really, but it'll be just miserable. My teacher will hate my writing, but I'll be famous when I'm dead."

       I couldn't help but think this was her staring into a mirror, picking herself apart—a painful process like slowly pulling glass out of your skin. I couldn't help but call this exposure, a naked woman pressing her breasts up against a window for a genuine lover to look at, like in that one Matthew Good song—Prime Time Deliverance or whatever. The girl on display clutching the telephone booth glass—she's cold, desperate, and starving. In this look, I felt convinced that I could travel across her body. I'd find London, England in her touch. Her mouth pressed against mine would take me to a shitty apartment in New York City where we would live, and we'd be too poor to afford a good bed, but we'd be happy nonetheless. I knew saying nothing would make me look boring, but I couldn't think of anything to say to her. I returned her diary and walked away. All I could do was hope she would grab my arm roofed with goose bumps and tell me to stay.