“Are you into confessional writing? Or any of the like scene stuff here? Like any of the stuff out of dimes?” a colleague asked while sipping on her shift drink, a mezcal Negroni I had forgotten to garnish with a grapefruit peel. An omission of which she was blissfully unaware.
“Nah,” I said. “Haven’t really read any, though? So, maybe?”
I had, however, given the city streets my own confessional just a few days before. Too eager to surprise Bella in McCarren Park and belonging to the city’s worst possible class of people (subscription Citi Bikers), I slammed an electric bike into its little charging port and hurried to Bella. In my excitement, I left a tote strapped into the bike’s cargo basket. In the tote was a diary filled with a year of daily life and a book I had been marinating on for so long that it was possible I had just stopped reading it.
The diary’s pages were subtle crescendos. Slow, directionless builds of me arriving at realizations that then played out in real life.
“I was super into PostSecret as a kid. You remember that site? So, maybe I’d like the genre.” I kept going as I put dishes away, my main duty at the bar.
“Uhh, no. Was that a Tumblr thing? Tumblr was kind of before my time.”
It was before Tumblr. I had dated myself—my mind too fixed on the diary to care.
It was the crescendos, not the climaxes, that I felt sad to lose: the dull months of digging between confessions and epiphanies.
At best, these in-between spaces were a reflexive commitment to untangling my life’s convenient but harmful lies. And even if they reinforced the lies instead of untangling them, I felt proud of the diary’s commitment to movement. I felt that in all that rote and circling writing that went nowhere, I betrayed an orientation towards the world that I liked. Maybe there was nothing shocking about my particular revelations, nothing to give the confessional reader their excitement or their catharsis. But the diary itself confessed something hopeful: more goodness, peace, and purpose were possible.
Sitting on the bench we had begun claiming as ours, Bella was on the phone. So, my surprise was muted. I gave the city streets a year of my life’s crescendos for a small wave and a cheeky smile as she recognized me, finished her call, and wrapped her arms around me.