The journal

“You don’t worry about grammar, structure spelling and all when you write with a pen and paper”

I have started maintaining a journal of sorts. I don’t know if calling it a journal will be correct, as more than anything else it just has my views, reflections on stuff, reciprocated on paper.

*flashback*

It would have been the same yellowish white wall I’d have been staring at, had it not been for the periodic table pasted on it. I closed my eyes, and repeated the  s-block elements out loud (the sole reason for having the periodic table there was this; knowing all the elements, and the general trends)

I opened my eyes then, and fairly satisfied with myself, opened the diary at the appropriate page. It was a nice diary. The paper wasn’t that thin, and it felt nice to run your hands over it. I picked up the pen, and started writing…

*/flashback*

That happened.

And happened quite regularly, without fail for an year, and intermittently so, before and after that.

I have the proof!

As a kid too, I used to maintain journals. Back then, all they used to contain were fairly trivial matters: the high fever I had a couple of days earlier, the newest song I liked, or the latest Pokémon episode. Fairly trivial.

But I used to do that, and that was perhaps the earliest form of my writing. Also there were the letters I wrote on postcards for my grandma. They were kind of sweet. Always began the same damn way, ‘Hoping this letter finds you in the best of health’

The period from the first year of college (when I stopped writing in the journal) to now, I mean a week from now actually, I maintained an incident-specific journal, i.e. whenever something happened which was worth noting down somewhere I’d write it down there, in that diary. Again it was fairly regular in the beginning, but the last entry I made in it was sometime in mid year, last year.

Then, some time back, while talking to a friend of mine, I was pushed into journal writing again. It happened in part because I was needing it, and in part because most of the times, all you need is a little push to do things you’ve been wanting to all this while.

I’ve been at it for a little while now, this morning I added the fourth one, in as many days. And it has been fairly liberating. There is no red tape. No need to worry about things. No need to think about the people who might or might not be hurt by what I write. It is writing at its purest. It is writing all for me, and by me.

Someday, while going through this, apart from the nostalgia, and the memories it will surely conjure. There will be something in here, which will push the seeds of a new story in my head.

Or not.