Everyone Else's Diary
by Miles Klee
I have always aspired to be a person who keeps a diary, or a journal, or some version of a record of his days on this planet. My attempts have always failed, even when I give myself ways to make it easier: only a sentence per entry, for example, or perhaps the allowance of more abstract impressions and moods than actual reportage on events—little word collages.
One notebook I began in the fall of 2020 got off to a promising start. The first page, dated September 26, recalls an afternoon at the beach with friends, where I saw a bat ray gliding through the shallows not far from where I stood. But this diary, like every one I’ve tried to maintain, soon devolved into complaints, so that it seemed to present a false version of myself—I have pessimistic views, but I am far from miserable or even depressed. Maybe it is easier to catalogue daily disappointments than describe the longer arc of what usually feels like a lucky, happy life. Maybe a sort of pretension forces me to perform the more “literary” mode of despair.
Plus, I often find it difficult to relate my experiences plainly. I come from a family with its share of exaggerators, which may partially account for why I prefer to use scenes from my life as the scaffolding for outlandish fiction. At some point it hit me—probably after I read Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9—Fog, in which she cut and rearranged striking lines from the diary of an elderly woman that she’d bought at an estate sale—that what I really wanted was an escape from my own internal monologue, relief from my own voice. I started another journal that contained no original writing whatsoever; I only wrote down things I overheard spoken by total strangers.
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