Today, I felt a strong urge to purge – something a pack rat like myself rarely gets.  Although I was exhausted after a long day, I took myself down to the basement to begin.  After about two hours, I had (for me) a pretty impressive stack to sell or giveaway.  It was then I came across it.  For a moment I stared at the notebook, remembering how it never left my side throughout college.  How I never went to class without it.  It wasn’t a journal –  it was a collection of poems I wrote about my daily experiences.

Thumbing through it, I first saw the poem about a man with whom I had fallen head over heels in love.  Within a second, I was back in my car in front of the Communications building at the University of Tennessee, sobbing hysterically as I wrote about lost love.  I laughed.  The man in the poem and I are still friends today, and I can’t even imagine being his wife.  This gave me the courage to read on.

As I read, I alternated between laughing at how naive I was to reflecting about how much I missed the cathartic cleansing of writing poems.  Today we have Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to air our feelings, and to clear out our anguished souls – instantly gratified by another person’s comment on our posts, but nothing beat my notebook for a best friend.  It would listen to me, regardless.

Right before I put away the notebook, I saw a piece of paper neatly folded, slid between two pages. It was a poem as well, but it was different from the others.  It was filled with such raw anguish.  The suffering of the writer poured off the page in waves, but there was a strange disconnect.  I felt like I was reading another person’s work, not my own.  But I remember writing the poem.  It was a few days after the doctor had told me that I had a condition that might preclude my having children.  To someone who adored kids, that felt like a death sentence. Sometimes, even today, it still does.

My first operation to try and correct the problem was coming up, and my doctor had told me if it didn’t work, he thought it would be best to have a hysterectomy.  At 19, I wasn’t ready to face an ending so big, so I did what I knew best – I wrote about it.    The pain is so real, it jumps off the page.  I wish I could reach back through time, to that young 19-year-old girl and tell her, “Your biggest fears came true, but you were able to still have a life.  It’s not an ending.  There is so much else in your life that brings you joy.”  And, the statement would be true.  But I’d also have to tell her, “You will still hurt over this for many years.  There will be times when you feel that you can’t hold on any longer.  But you will.”   I can’t go back, though, so I folded the page and placed it back in the notebook.

I think, tomorrow, I’ll go find another notebook.