I have this long document I’ve been writing into since the pandemic started. It contains diary entries, shopping lists, overheard conversations, prose, memories, dream journals, things me and mum spoke about on our video calls, interesting (to me) sections of my granny’s diaries as I transcribed them. Everything’s in there. Except the things I missed.
Occasionally, I need or want to find something in this long document, so I use the Page Finder function, typing various words for my search. Tomato (34 matches). Mum (311 matches). Green (106 matches). With each word match I am cast about further back in time. April 2020. June 2021. October 2020. February 2023. My laptop whirs and freaks out from the effort. The screen goes blank, then reappears. Tear (30). Henry. (413). Compost (210). George Saunders. Garden. Granny. I fly or am thrown about. I’m crying in the work toilets in London. I’m eating lettuce we grew in Norfolk. I’m five years old at the after-school club. My Granny is alive and she’s slicing me some pear.
It feels like magic to time travel in this way. It’s like shaking a Magic 8 Ball or throwing a dice. Everything is random and disjointed, yet connected in theme. Tear can be crying, or something shared, or the thing I do to letters before recycling them. This process is extremely self-interested and probably only of interest to me or… I don’t know? Writers who like diaries? But I like colliding with typos, falling through the sentences and paragraphs like a heavy marble through plastic straws in that children’s game. Kerplunk! Coming up against this sense of abundance in the document where linear time doesn’t exist, but everything is inside there, unfolding and happening at once. Communicating everything and nothing like synapses or neurons. You know those dreams where you discover a room that was there all along? The room existed inside your house the whole time, as you lived your life around it. Stumbling around this document is like that; opening doors. I find time-travelling in this way deeply comforting but also vivid and wild; I don’t know if that’s simply vanity or a much-needed ‘post’-pandemic therapy as a way of processing how I spent my time and what just happened. Or grief therapy, years after my granny died, or just a way to process what we’re meant to do with being alive. I think it’s everything, and that’s what I like about it. I know I have a problem with collecting. In this document collection isn’t a problem, it’s creation.
Below: Time travelling through GREEN. There isn’t really a point in me sharing these, beyond putting them out there. The whole point in me once again having a blog is to share without too much anxiety or worry about things being astute, decided, presentable, fast and efficient in the attention economy. I’ve spent many years worrying and I’m really ready to give less of a shit. It’s nice to be here. Not always in a grid.
