tristful-trustfall - Tumblr blog

[tristful-trustfall]

The Diary

When she was younger she would keep a diary in her bedroom, on the little table next to her bed, so that she could run her finger down its spine as she went to sleep. It was a beautiful diary, covered in leather with a pattern of silver crowns, filled with parchment paper that made her feel as if this was an artifact from an ancient world. She had a feather quill too – long, soft, a glorious smooth pearl white ending in a glistening gold nib. Next to this she kept a bottle of ink she'd found in her mother's closet.

Every night before she went to sleep she'd stare at the diary and the pen and the bottle. She said she wanted to make a beautiful diary, filled with beautiful drawings and beautiful thoughts, so that anyone who saw it years later would be awed. She wanted to create an artifact of her own, preserved for the rest of eternity, with rough sketches and messy handwriting that still looked beautiful. Beautiful...for she sought not authenticity, but perfection.

Every night before she went to sleep she'd open the diary and gently lift her pen to the page, imagining how it would feel to write her first words. She was always too afraid. She was scared of making a mistake, scared of writing something drab, scared of creating anything less than what she had imagined.

"Tomorrow," she said. "I'll start tomorrow."

When she left for college, the ink bottle went back into her mother's closet, unopened.

And the diary? Still sitting on her nightstand. Blank.