a date neatly noted

I never used to date my work. In school there was always a place for the date and seldom a day did I fill it in. It didn’t feel important at the time, didn’t seem to matter. Really I thought I’d never look back at my time as a student, elementary, middle, or high school. It just… didn’t seem to matter. 

Before I moved this past time, in April, I had to go through ever piece of everything I own, or now owned. It was an arduous process, it took weeks and some things took months. It is not a process I long to repeat any time soon. While doing so I sorted through all my old school papers, seeing what I might like to keep and what I’d like to burn. Not only metaphorically I literally burnt the papers I didn’t keep. It was final, and even as I said good riddance I felt my heart ache. Not all my school journey was for my betterment, but not all of it was for my doom. It’s something I hold in tension to itself to this day. 

In this searching and deciding I took notice of the fact that so little was dated. There was a spattering of general dates and little else, made it hard to know what was from when. I wanted to be angry with my younger self, but I couldn’t. Purposefully neglecting to write down the date was a rebellious resignation. I didn’t want to be in school, yet could do very, very little to change that temporary reality. And wasn’t that the crux of it, I couldn’t see it as temporary. It felt like a purgatorial hell, as evidenced by my own actions or inactions, something that would never come to an end, and I was desperate for it to end. 

I don’t have a gripe with education as a whole, only the years I spent as a student were, hard, to put it as a mild mannered understatement of fact. It was far worse than hard, for far more reasons than I may ever come to terms with. But I have been through two schools since graduating from high school and in every one of those note books, on every page, there is a date neatly noted in every corner. 

I started journaling just before the beginning to 2019, I’d gone through a massive heart change, had found a great deal of life once again. I was painfully aware of how easy it is for me to forget, no matter how much I care I might still forget things that matter to me. So I began writing down as much as I could stand to. It, no hyperbole, changed the trajectory of my life, I surely would not be here writing this very piece had I not wrote that first entry. 

Now I date every thing. Right down to the time stamp of the start and end on some things. It’s a little ridiculous but it makes me happy, to know that even if I forget I’ll always have something to point to and say I lived. I even took notes. Suppose it’s a little of what they call a butterfly effect. Strange but gleeful.