Lined Memories

As I fill in these skinny lined pages, I wonder : what’s the point of all the prettification? What’s the point of leaving behind our marks and our goodbyes when the person may never look back at our little farewell message again?

More specifically, I began to think of the temporary nature of human relationships. How fragile we are in our friendships…and our very existence, for that matter. It’s quite something, putting your diary out there and asking someone to write in it. It’s like saying : “Here, if I ever choose to look back at my final year in school, I’d like to see your token of superficiality.” You’re putting yourself out there. As I stick in a picture of the guy I took to my matric dance, the thought of whether or not to ask him to write within the pages of my textual time capsule occurred to me.

How do I phrase it? Indeed, I would love to have a memory of him – as I’m one of the few nostalgic souls who can spend hours lamenting on the past- yet I don’t want to pressure him into writing something he doesn’t mean, as we aren’t the closest of friends. Yet somehow, by virtue of the fact that I’ve spent the apparently most important night of the year with him, I’ve forged this inexplicable bond in my head that only the dizziness of female emotion would induce. Therefore, I have come up with the following question – being the smooth operator that I am :

“Hey, so …I’d like you to sign my diary – you can write something in it if you want, but just signing it is okay.”

The setting of pen to paper would help verify the reality of time passed. Was March really that long ago? Are these memories really … just memories? It’s funny how the fleeting moment becomes transposed into simply a memory : as the time you’ve spent reading this will become nothing but a memory of time spent trawling a chick’s blog.

Matric dance partners aside, what of the people in your life beyond school that mean something to you? The friends you’ve made along the way. Would they be perturbed by the fact that you’re asking them to enter a piece of themselves into your memory book? Or flattered? Or – maybe worse than the both of these – completely indifferent.

Relationships are so confusing. Putting them onto paper seems to clarify them, to me, but it’s asking the person to write that’s most unnerving.