Back in 1994 when I lived in Romania, I kept a journal. I thought that I might collect some interesting stories, that I might write some of those down, that I might revisit those memories in my old age and remember I once went on a little adventure.
The writing itself is nauseating, but detailed. I still feel my heart drop through the pit of my stomach reading about those first 24 hours, flying from Kansas City to Bucharest, driving 6 hours through the Carpathians, being led through 12 foot wooden gates into a 16th century courtyard at 2 am in the morning. I still know the sound of my footsteps on those cobblestones. I smell the diesel fumes trapped by a street never designed for automobiles. I learned how to laugh at irony in those months, my host father, a pediatrician, telling me how once he visited Las Vegas during the communist years, though the local police only allowed him to go after attaching a recording device to his phone, taking a full inventory of his possessions and stamping his visa with these words, ‘If you don’t return on time, or if your wife tries to sell any of your belongings, your family will have trouble.’.
He looked at me as he said this, and laughed, ‘Funny, no?’
At the time, I had simply said, ‘No.’
But I think we finally understand each other now, these 12 years later, how he not only could laugh at his misery and injustice, but sincerely found it laughable.
He asked me, ‘Why do you write so much in your journal?’ clearly aware of my tendency to steal off at any moment to record what I felt I would need to remember.
‘I don’t know,’ had been my answer. The admission struck me. Soon after, I stopped writing in my journal. I never wrote another journal entry again until two years ago. An entire decade that I will not remember.
What is it about a new year? Perhaps the revolution brings new light from the sun; different light; a second chance at aspiration.
Today, then, brings new light from what I wanted to forget one revolution ago.
So in this new light, I type again, in the old way.
Habit as catharsis.
Merely the illusion of healing.
But new light, nonetheless.