Start a new book. Start a new book.
How many half-filled journals do I have lying around my home? There must be ten or more on the shelf that I'm staring at. All mixed up so the dates are inconsistent. Skip back and forth. Half the entries online, half on paper. Start a new book.
I feel like I'm losing something every time I pick up another blank journal and start over. Let me write these same introductions and hope that this time the entries will be consistent and the words intelligent. Let me later reflect on the dreams written here and find them realized. Let me finally tell the story of my life with honesty, and let me like what I read.
I am compelled. The empty page mocks me. There are books and books of them awaiting my pen. Blank paper stacked to the ceiling. I feel like I have something to say, not because I'm wiser or wittier than other people, just because of that singular compulsion. I've a story that I'm waiting to tell. It's because I somehow know that it will be the words that will define me in the end. The letters. All my love and smiles and relationships will show the world who I am, but this paper keeps calling me back and demanding ink and answers.
I know I could write anything. I really want to write fiction most of all, and I've dreamed up great heroes with quests to break destiny. But again and again I only end up writing what I know. All I write are more journal entries, wherever they might be. And when I'm finally offered a free scrap and the freedom to create a story that isn't centered on myself, I hesitate. And hours are lost to silence.
I have this over-arching awareness of my own mortality. My mother says to me "Heather, you just don't realize how young you are. You're not even twenty." But I'm all too aware of the way it will happen. I'll wake up one morning to the shock of my own gray hairs. I'll realize that I've been waking up to the same routine for fifteen years, years that seem like no more than the space of a breath, and that the sun is no longer rising, but setting. When is that opening line going to dawn on me; when am I going to get about what I really want to do?
I feel like I have lost touch with something important. That something is missing. But of course, when I read older journals, I talk like I've been missing something my whole life. My entries are longings; sometimes for God, sometimes for Jeff, sometimes for justice. Today, I long for the opening line to my story. My defining story.
A professor once told me that we are nothing more than the tales we tell. We are limited editions of short story collections. Assemblies of letters. Scratches on a page. Sounds spoken. I have just cracked the spine of another blank journal, and I hesitate. Then these same struggles pour out again, and I discover my story is more about second-guessing than originality.
After a while, I'm going to read these words and think "what a melodramatic sap I am".
If only I could stop starting new journals again and again and again. I'd just stick to the old book, because the old way is good. Float away from these moments of frenzy when I burn with this expressionless passion and come back to something calm and centered. Quit straining artistic muscles, and let strength build slowly. Quit holding my breath.

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The template needs fixing, but I'll get to that later.
Today's strange quote "Oh Heather, I'm so combustible right now!"  ¶ 21:44