Signed Proof
Reading the diary of the one you love would be the only sure way to find out their true feelings. I came in through the door and she was standing in the middle of the room, declaring herself, smiling at me in her cute way, rolling her lower lip like a naughty child, playing caught in the act. ‘I did something bad…I looked in your diary.’ What was I writing in there? Unbearing my soul, saving it all for this notebook. She wanted to know, she took it upon herself, rather than wait for me to eventually volunteer the information. It was too tempting for her but her inscription was also an admission of wrong-doing.
She left her name and the date after the last entry. Her handwriting, her cursive, side-ways-slanted script, isnʼt that different from mine. Someone else probably wouldnʼt be able to tell the difference, but I see it straight away, itʼs too neat, too legible. I think I write badly, unconsciously, so my diary canʼt be read by someone who doesnʼt know my individual shorthand: the fʼs that have no top, which look like tʼs spanning two lines, like daggers, those typographical marks, references pointing back in on themselves, sending outsider eyes in endless circles, how an -ed at the ends of words unravels to create unconjugated verbs of indistinct tenses, eʼs like long bars – keeping myself out of reach from others. Iʼve developed my own style of writing to hide myself, to keep in coded form the things Iʼm not ready to share.
‘Read up to here’, she was telling me. To the last entry. Her name, then underneath, ‘3/12/2023’, marking a point in time. Now, all the words before that date, I do not own them anymore, they are no longer mine. They used to be a part of me, I used to love every word, they were sacred, Iʼd carry them with me everywhere, I wouldnʼt be without them, I had to be in physical contact with them, now they hold no emotion for me, I could abandon them without feeling. Iʼd happily leave them on a train speeding noiselessly across the country of your origin, eventually arriving at one of those shops where the Swiss sell unclaimed lost property found on trains, where they cross-compare online listings to find an itemʼs exact second-hand value, to then be put in a glass case and occasionally peered at, bought out of boredom by a post-graduate creative who used to play at being poor when he was child.
‘I want to choose what I disclose’, I said. To give myself gradually, reading each other’s implicit signals, to feel out a moment. Maybe you never work someone out fully, maybe you could keep extending together. ‘I trust you less now,’ I told her. ‘I know, I feel terrible. Iʼm really sorry’, she said. She tried to explain why she’d done it. She wanted to know if I was okay, if I was depressed, she was looking out for me, or ‘Maybe you secretly hate me’, she said. I didnʼt know what to say. She carried on, ‘How could I know for sure?’ I was trying to work out if she was being genuine.
‘Why would you think I hate you?’
But itʼs perfectly possible to hate someone you love. Iʼd see it in her face later. Iʼd see it in myself too. ‘Love and Hate construct between them the machinery of human contact’, Anne Carson writes in Eros: The Bittersweet. ‘Does it make sense to locate both poles of this affect within the single emotional event of eros?’ she asks. ‘Presumably, yes, if a friend and enemy converge in the being who is its occasion.’
She promised sheʼd never do it again. The event was non-defining, it didn’t change our weekend routine of breaking up for good and then burying our heads in the other’s necks. I decided not to hide my diary away and we continued being with each other. At that time though, Iʼd never have thought to ask myself the question that Carson poses.
A diary could be a complete proof of heart. To voluntarily share your diary with someone you love, youʼd be revealing yourself fully, the bad inside you, the parts that will never change, despite your attempts at self-improvement, youʼd be risking your future together. In Anna Karenina, Kitty says yes to Levinʼs proposal of marriage, she couldnʼt be happier, but Levin feels this sudden, unbearable need to confess himself to his wife-to-be, and a day before the ceremony gives her his diary, just as Tolstoy turned over his diary to Sophia Andreevna before they married. ‘[Levin] had written this diary with his future fiancée in mind.’ He had been preparing for this moment, to finally be worthy of love. His diary would ensure it would last if it came. She wouldn’t find out anything fundamentally terrible later. Kitty tells him she will take him whatever the diary contains, not knowing the depths of his depravities. ‘Two things tormented him: his impurity and his unbelief.’ His “external” irreligion didnʼt affect her. Maybe for her doubt was the sign of a robust faith. ‘She knew his whole soul through love’. But the other confession made her cry bitter tears. ‘Take them, take these terrible books!’ says Kitty, full of grief. The narrator doesn’t relay specifics. We do not get to read Levin’s diary, it remains his secret, which he only shares with Kitty, then it becomes their secret. Love is a transmutation of confession.
My diary contained no sin. There was nothing incriminating inside, no hidden effusion. There was actually very little about her. Perhaps she could have been reasonably hurt that she seemed to occupy no significant part of my inner life. My diary was largely full of self-actualisations. My ambition has always been my only religion. If I write something down, I canʼt not do it. I was writing to my future self. I couldnʼt bear to write anything that could break, that wouldnʼt definitely be a constant, a record of the past, entirely of my own making, that couldn’t be changed or undone by anyone else.
We were always fighting. I was always projecting forward, trying to control the situation with words, giving off certitude when she expressed doubt, saying ‘No, really, forever’. She was the pessimist, protecting herself, maybe her apprehensions were safeguarding us, preventing us from committing to something that might not work, trying to make us see our problems, testing the future I had imagined for us. I thought that was my role, to make all the impossibilities seem surmountable, step by step: pack two suitcases, fly to Zurich or London, find an apartment, get work, be happy together.
You can lie to someone you love, just as easily as you can self-edit, self-deceive in a diary. To decide to reject reality. She would have called them lies, but she wanted to hear it too. Still, I could cry for her. I never wanted to hurt her. I was trying to make us both believe. ‘How come now you donʼt want to love me more everyday?’ Looking back, she was much better at feeling her way through, existing in the present, where we were at. She saw through the self-heroics.
Why didnʼt I rub out her inscription? I donʼt think it would have helped, Iʼd have known it was there. You can erase pencil but it can leave a trace and the trace is more difficult to bear than the original pencil. We donʼt talk anymore. She always said that if we ever broke up Iʼd find it easy to cut her out of my life. We maybe both found it practical in the end. But I like that she etched herself onto me. Maybe a diary can change as you can change. Her name stays there on the page, not fixed, it still has the uncertainty of a living thing.
Cover image: Writer’s diary page with date inscribed in pencil. Image taken by writer.