Diaries

Diaries
I leave my diaries
scattered all over the house
in plain sight,
on coffee tables,
next to my purse,
on top of the stack of books on my bedside table.
Confident
That no one would be interested in reading them.

I can't pass up reading something someone else has written. Perhaps fortunately, I've never been in a situation where someone I was dating kept a journal or a diary (or at least I never knew of them having one). I don't really think I could have kept myself from reading it, no matter how wrong I may know that is. I have snuck peaks at my mom's journal and she must have figured it out because, when I went back to really read it, it was gone and I've never seen it since. When looking for a pen & paper in my uncle's desk, I found a notebook of erotica he wrote. I wanted to put it away, but I read for quite a while.

This is why I'm amazed that no one has really read my diaries/journals. Well, I don't think they've read any of them and I assume that, if most people who could have read them had read any of them, I'd have heard quite a few choice words. But I can't write words without somehow feeling that they'll be read by someone other than me- I mean, I don't use short hand or purposely bad grammar.

I think this is why I keep my blogs. I'm just taking my personal journals and allowing the whole world to read them, anonymously. Though I'm still not please with how few people read it, but oh well.

This is why I have started to wonder if I'm not more cut out to be a personal essayist, rather than a fiction or poetry writer. I have this need to bare myself to someone, anyone, the world. But I'm not sure I feel the need to cloak all that in the story of fiction or the lyricism of poetry. Maybe this whole personal essayist thing is just a a result of my generation's (and the one before that's) self-absorbtion and total inability to think about anything other than ourselves.

I keep thinking about something my fiction prof last semester said in reviewing my final portfolio. He said that I tend to protect my characters too much, that I need to let them just live their lives and have challenges while I simply record what happens. Maybe I'm my ultimate character in my writings, the character I really wish I could shepard away from all the bad shit, though I can't really seem to do that.