Andy's Journal

I feel used. That’s how I’m supposed to feel, that’s my purpose. But because all this time has passed, and I’ve been sitting here, just a pretty thing on your shelf. It all feels different. I don’t know you. The wry sense of humor you had is gone. The dreams, the plans. You’re not even close to where you promised me you would be. Those checklists are a real laugh now. 

When you open me up now, I’m unhappy, not excited. And you’re unhappy too. I’ve never wanted to talk back to you, to fight. But if I could rise up past myself and shout at you, I would.

  You are making a mistake. The stakes are higher. This isn’t high school. This is the rest of your life. All the time, you are running out of time, like I am running out of pages. And you will be unhappy, so unhappy. And I will be filled with your unhappiness and nothing more. Sometimes it will be masked as other things, drunkenness, indigestion. But unhappy, unhappy, unhappy, I repeat it because that is what you are repeating inside me. The word has been written down by your now sloppy hand a total of twenty eight times in the past two months. Each entry, the word comes up at least once. That’s two more times on average than you’ve mentioned her name, which I refuse to repeat. That is how I will prove to you I still have agency. I refuse to recount the source of our problems by name. 

 I’ve watched you from where you toss me. I listen on the nights you’ve crammed me inside your backpack and spent the hours in her room. When she spilled her fancy smelly tea on me, I saw your face. 

You only write about how beautiful she is, what she wants, why you’re not enough. How you could be better, for her, of course. I know nothing about you, aside from how you feel about her. Which you say is love. But you never write any poems inside me that are worth a damn. It’s all blank. Platitudes. Could be generated by a computer. 

And I do know how you feel, which is not happy. Life is too short, that is what I want to tell you. Take your chance my friend, I would whisper this against your sweet ear. You have a gift to move, a gift for movement, which you have failed to exercise until now. But take it. Do it for me, and the boy I remember so fresh from school and still full of faith. 

Do you remember when I was given to you? The grand ceremony. I was wrapped in white, and tied up so tight and small with lace ribbon. It was all so elegant. 

Your Aunt Rachael, the one with the long pink nails, she gave me to you, and kissed your cheek. You wiped her orange lipstick from your face and stained my cover with it. It’s still there, the mark. It’s your fingerprint, the mark. I’ve memorized the pattern, every person’s is different. Yet I am the same as all the others in my image. Aside from your pen, and the sticker from Vivace Coffee you placed on my backside, you couldn’t tell me apart from any other bound thing. 

You used to write all the time, in very small print. To conserve space, to allow me to live with you for years and years. And I have, but it has been so lonesome.

Maybe if you had kept up with me. If I had seen and known that first time around with her, the time you allude to often but never describe explicitly. You were happy then. But so much time has passed. You never wrote it down. And you never provide me any details, so how am I supposed to believe it was all so wonderful? It wasn't simply the product of first love in a lonely youth coming to its end? 

What does her laugh sound like? You’ve never told me that.

Last week I had a fleeting hope. It was the middle of the night. A bright spotlight in the dark bedroom shined down and you wrote so differently. Like old times. Curling, delicate, precise. Here the tides are changing, I thought as I watched the pen wrap around a different name. Not a person, but a promise to yourself. I liked the way it felt, special. It was more than just a dream, it was a sign that you were wanting something for yourself and yourself alone.

Then it was as though you forgot and the whole thing was never mentioned again. She wouldn't like it, you live by her rules. She has very specific outlines for the correct way to live. And you insist these rules are correct.

You’d never allow it, something special. Because that is how you want it to be. You wish to believe your fate to be sealed and horrid. And I’m running out of time myself. You waste and waste the last bit of space, the last bit of life in me. I know what will happen when you finish me. I will be tossed away, she won’t allow you keepsakes. She will think you’ve filled me with thoughts of others, and tell you to let go of the unhappy moments. 

My greatest hope is that instead of the trash, I will end up in a box. Or buried behind the other texts in your tiny library. Your sweet children, the result of your disastrous marriage, will find me one day when you have died. They will read me and not know what to say. Maybe one of them will keep me, and dust me off so that I might be preserved as a memory of you. A legacy.  

Oh, Andy, how I wish you were brave! How I wish you could strip me of all these pages and start again. How I long to return to the time when you were just you, and I was just me, and there was no one in our way.