Eli Albert

Oh, Diary

Stephanie kept her diary in a cool, dark drawer. I knew this because I could imagine it, just as I imagined anything else about her that I didn’t know. I could feel the cold coming off of the thin bound book when I put my hand on it, in the dark back seat of the cab that we took coming home from the expensive concert downtown. I didn’t want to go the concert and I certainly didn’t want to pay the money, but Stephanie asked me, so what else could I do?

I wonder why she took her diary to the concert. We arrived there an hour early and bought the tickets with enough money for six fancy dinners each with cash left over for six more. She grasped that book in her left hand the whole time, while she did everything else with the right, and she didn’t seem to know or care. Stephanie has reddish hair and freckly skin, like most redheads, but she isn’t offensively freckly. I want that to be clear, because there are plenty of redheads that I wouldn’t want to be. To me Stephanie’s skin, on the contrary, was always just right.

The band was Santana, of all people. Stephanie’s music taste is as fun and varied as anyone I know, and I certainly feel a specific affinity for Santana. His guitar has a particular sound to it, something clear but at the same time extremely far from uniform or boring, something a tiny bit like the contrast between Stephanie’s red hair and her clear freckly skin. Of course we both knew, deep down, that by then Santana was as washed out as he was still popular – that he rode his own coattails, that his dabbling in strange new “feel-good” ideologies (which he made sure to talk about for about ten minutes during the concert) was detrimental, ultimately, to that grand ability which had gotten him to where he was – the music.

So she knew it, and I knew it, but she asked me to go with her, and I told her I would, and does that mean that we went more for each other than for Santana? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. But then it comes up again – why did she bring that book? As far as I know, she didn’t even bring anything to write with. We simply arrived, plunked down the money, entered the concert, enjoyed ourselves, and left. I couldn’t stop thinking that Madison Square Garden is as huge a room as I’ve ever seen. It’s shaped like an egg, but of course it’s much bigger. In the echoing recesses of that concert hall I think you could probably fit an island, or perhaps a small moon, and yet somehow, the sound more than filled up the place, and overflowed over, into and through our poor defenseless ears. Big and loud is all I remember of Santana.

Then we were in the back seat of a cab and the diary was sitting between us. It kept a lookout like a chaperoning parent; it separated us more effectively than did our seatbelts. Any other book probably wouldn’t have had any effect, but a diary, as you might know, is something sacred. You can’t disregard a diary without facing some sort of consequence. It was then that I decided I would have to meet and know my enemy.

So, as I’ve said already, I put my hand on the diary. Stephanie’s conversation with me was ranging through our normal eclectic mix of topics and I do believe that I was responding adequately, but my thoughts were elsewhere. It was a strange dialogue that then passed between the diary and I. I find this ironic now, now that I keep a diary as well, because I often find myself in a similar sort of dialogue. It’s never one-sided, despite what you’re thinking.

Dear Diary, I thought, my hand on the cold cover. Stephanie hadn’t as yet noticed, and she continued with our conversation, which happened to be about cookies.

“Once I ate a cookie,” she was saying, cutely, “and I have no idea where or when or what kind of cookie it was. But it was the best cookie I ever ate.”

-I think I understand you. I think you know how much I envy you. How much I wish that I could know the things that you must know, if only for a second. How much I would give up for that.

“What did it taste like?” I asked.

“Well,” she thought for a minute, her head characteristically tilted to the side. Her long legs, crossed right over left, shifted slightly. Her entire body, at that moment (and at most other moments) ached, no, her entire being ached with an implicit fun and laughter that seemed ready to burst from her smile and overrun my senses.

-How can you bare it? How can you just sit there, smug between your covers? How can I bear it, dear Diary, just sitting here, helpless, next to her?

“I think it tasted really full, lots of butter, really…” she trailed off again.

“Thick?” I put in, having an idea of which cookie in the world really is the best cookie in the world.

“Definitely!” she interjected, without a moment of doubt, “Thick is the right word. But how did you know?” she laughed a little, and even looked slightly uncomfortable, but that was gone in a second. No one likes their thoughts read, but Stephanie’s delight with the coincidence of understanding overcame her discomfort.

“Snickerdoodles,” I said.

-Oh, Diary, she’ll never understand. Or maybe she does understand, and that’s the worst feeling there is. Maybe, in her infinite wisdom, she knows exactly how I feel, and does nothing. More likely she doesn’t know. She isn’t perfect. The idealized Stephanie in my imagination does know, of course, but if she were to act, if she were to stoop down to my level, she wouldn’t be ideal anymore. Maybe that’s why an existent god is a contradiction in terms.

“Everyone remembers the first time they try snickerdoodles. They’re yellow and crumbly, and they taste amazing, and you don’t even know how much you love them until the second or third bite, but by then you know that you’re lost, right? Hopelessly mired. Then they’re gone, because you’ve eaten them all…”

She looked at me with an all new delight. Then she noticed my hand on the book. She glanced between us both and chuckled.

“Have you two met?”

-Hey buddy, she’s on to us.

-I know.

“I think so,” I said, and paused. “Do you ever get this feeling -” is what I then started to say, but paused again. The moment was gone.

-Do you ever want to just scream out the obvious, but of course you can’t, and you know you’re being a stupid emo kid but you can’t do anything about that either? The ideal gets mixed up with the real and leaves you paralyzed, Diary. You probably wouldn’t know anything about that.

-If only you knew what I know, friend.