On my way home for Spring Break, I realized I had left my journal behind.

My journal was always the first thing I reached for to put in my bag for any trip, close or far. In high school I always plopped it into my tote bag to go to the park with my friend; when I went to Korea this summer I carried it with me when I moved into Yale it lived among my textbooks. My journal has always been an extension of me.

I have had my fair share of embarrassing middle school diaries that I started but never finished. But I don’t count those as my journals (they should all be burned somewhere and never see the light of day). 

I got Journal #1 on the last day of ninth grade with my friend at Barnes & Noble, and ever since that day I have been furiously scribbling away. Now I am working on Journal #5. Over the course of five journals I have tried hardback, paperback, different colors and different brands and I have decided that a navy blue dotted line paperback Leuchtturm1917 is my favorite type of journal (they were Journal #3 & #4). 

Maybe it’s the weird, thick, supposedly waterproof paper of #5, maybe it’s the way the paperback almost feels like a hardback… but I have not wanted to write in my journal in a very long time. I forced myself to write something short in it last month in February, but only because I felt weird about not writing anything in so long. 

All that being said, I forgot to bring Journal #5 back home for spring break, and it was killing me. 

The things at home I used to love relentlessly bore me now. The same small towns, the same walk to the airport, the same drives to the same places over and over and over and over again. The routines that gave me stability are now a bit monotonous, because they bring the same thoughts and the same memories. My beautiful home haunts me just a little bit, making me bitterly nostalgic. While I was back all I wanted was to vent out into Journal #5 which was unfortunately miles away from my house in Vanderbilt Hall.

It’s not that I like writing – I need writing. To my core I am an overthinker, and I have always needed my journal to vent out my thoughts… but over the past few months I have come to realize that I actually think about the things I write about, and I write about the things I think about: it’s this endless cycle that doesn’t actually help me clear my head. However, there’s just something so grounding about rereading my crooked handwriting and looking back on past memories, and usually I can picture exactly where I was when I wrote something down. 

But I do not know if I miss writing, I just know I have not been writing as much lately. Since January, as simple as it may sound, I have been busy living. There are too many things to do, people to meet, places to go, and I kind of just don’t want to be bothered to sit with my thoughts and write about them or linger upon them for too long. I have always felt the need to put everything, every feeling I have ever had into words, afraid to forget even the tiniest of emotions or the smallest of details. 

And I trust myself to remember the important things. I don’t think I could forget even if I tried.