Six Word Memoirs on Life Stories

Backstory

stop writing, not that I’ve stopped entirely now but other times I have. Sometimes years have passed with hardly a scribble. I could look back at my journal - if you could call it that but I suppose that is what it is – and years would be missing in some places. Then my journal starts back in 1975, I was 15, and I can remember the bedroom I first started writing it in. Sometimes I think I should shred it all; how embarrassing if someone found the papers and read them – I mean if I croaked unexpectedly or something – then here would be all this incriminating evidence, all these lurid and secret thoughts, hidden away on pages no one ever sees. But I can’t bring myself to throw the pages away, though I suppose I should – but in effect the journal is my memory of things that have faded and have gone unremembered for many years. I use to look back more often, use to read the pages over – I especially did that when I was going through my dilemma with Mike. Maybe I thought I would find the answers to that quandary hidden away in my own prattle. But I found nothing really, just the slow realization that Mike was an ego hound and that I fulfilled his hunger in that regard quite well.

[6/27/00, unedited journal]