Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within.

Kafka

Journals hint at what’s long been hidden under the ice. They shimmer with patterns of longing, secrets, untold stories. The diarist plays detective to his own days, uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary, the true story beneath the stubbornly recorded fact. (For what is left out is often more interesting that what’s chosen, the central dramas often held offstage — love, heartbreak, betrayal.) Yet no matter how incomlete or fitfully kept, journals honor that most human of instincts: our need to leave a trace.

Alexandra Johnson

During the act of writing, I have told myself something that I didn’t know I knew.

Gail Godwin

Oh, this complex business of online journal writing! I have ben doing it now for 27 years, longer by far and more prolific than any print journal I ever attempted. And still, though there are days when I feel I have told my whole life’s story through these characteristic “personal essays” that constitute my “journal,” I realize I am never going to be done with it. I hope not anyway.

I agree with what Godwin says. I think I write online essays for several reasons which I am aware of, and even more of which I am unaware. That is the mystery of writing. But one of them is to try to know something through the act of writing that I did not know about myself before. When I actually start to let words flow from my soul, my mind, my unconscious self, I dig down below the layers of the known and I discover things about myself. I write about who I “was” in hopes of knowing better who I now “am.”

We can create a world when we write, a waking dream, as fiction writers do. Or, we can awaken the sleeping, unconscious self by entering and exiting along the winding path that is our past and present.

Just as we never notice the countryside when speeding by on the interstates, but are suddenly back in the world again when we exit and travel through a small town on a less used back road, so too with writing. It is like deliberately seeing new countryside for the first time. Our senses absorb the impressions of a new place. Then, journals allow us to record our wanderings in search of ourselves along those back roads of our minds, going spontaneously where we have not gone before. Or maybe deliberately. One never knows what will happen when writing.

We live in the present moment, but have arrived here through a long succession of those essential moments of living that now comprise our pasts. How much of that do we ever choose to remember, or better yet, record? Why do certain memories keep coming back to us? How can we separate the past from the present? Or should we? We can reminisce, or we can write about what we are doing right now, which often is simply thinking about what happened yesterday.

My brother and I have rarely travel together, but 22 years ago on a trip to Sumter, (the small city in South Carolina where my mother and there three sister grew up), he was very talkative, for some reason. Little things from our past kept coming up. It’s amazing what brief images and memories are revived by simple words and recollections. For instance, remembering how we would stop at a gas station after hundreds of miles of drivng on our vacation trips, stretch wearily, and head for the soft drink machine outside the service station. Plunk in 15 cents and retrieve an ice-cold Orange Crush or Nehi Grape soda. Then get a package of Lance Nekot crackers. What could be better than a cold Orange Crush? Not from a plastic two-liter bottle or from a can, but in a bottle. Just tastes better. The memory of those soft drinks evokes pleasant associations from my past. Vacations were happy times. Soda bottles and crackers bring back those times. Then, back on the road.. Rested and content for another few hundred miles until the end of our journey was in sight.

That sight for years when we were kids was a huge old overpass above the railroad tracks just before entering South Main Street in Sumter. A huge sign said, “Welcome to Sumter, the Gamecock City (named after Revolutionary War Gen. Thomas Sumter who is from the area). We children in the back seat would all get very excited at the prospect of soon seeing my aunt and grandparents. What loving welcomes we would get! And, a week of carefree, childhood bliss would follow: swimming in the millpond, huge Southern dinners every afternoon at 1 pm sharp, all of us gathered around the table for fried fish, biscuits, rice and gravy, poll beans, fresh tomatoes, corn on the cob and more.

Our trip to Sumter back in 2003 was somber. We were traveling to visit my aunt in the hospital. She was doing better after breaking her hip, having surgery, and starting to recover in rehab. But the sadness kept breaking in as I watched her smile at us and hold up so bravely after all she has been through. And I thought of her greeting us at the door 60 or more years ago when we arrived on vacation.

We drove over the overpass just like we always had when we were children, my determined father hunched at the wheel of our 1956 Chevy Bel-Air after driving for 18 hours with only a few stops. But the sign was gone. Main Street was there ahead of us. But instead of going to my aunt’s house, we drove to the hospital.

And so, as I listen now to a Pete Fountain album, memories of my youth in New Orleans briefly flashing before me as I write, I pause to consider what all this means. I realize that I am writing to understand myself better, and also, for whoever reads this now and in the future, I am writing to “leave a trace” of me behind, a part of me that might endure after I am gone, somewhere, someplace and for some purpose that I don’t know and never will.