I dropped my travel bag on the couch and browsed the bookshelves. There wasn’t much that I recognized. No Tom Robbins, Tim Dorsey, John D. Macdonald, Carl Hiaasen, Harry Crews. Hell, not even Stephen King. Most of the spines looked old and academic. A couple by Crowley. Shit that I was into when I was in my early twenties, trying to appear dark and complex. Books on sobriety, philosophy, New Age spirituality, which Cassie would have loved, Goetia something. I saw one sticking out an inch from the rest, a book with a Russian title, Mácmep u Macsapúma, and discovered loose pages tucked inside. Flipped through them and saw that it was a journal of some kind, handwritten in blue ink. Recently, it seemed.

I put the book back on the shelf and carried the loose pages to the couch. I set the box of Teddy Grahams between my legs and ate stale crackers while reading the following account. My mouth becoming increasingly dry as the story evolved.

* * *

April 22

I used to keep a diary when I was younger. Around the time I began to fancy boys, if memory serves. My entries were not so much chronicles on my daily activities as they were love poems. Exaltations from my eleven-year-old heart on what it meant to long for another. Some snotty-nose prat, most like, who had pulled my hair on the playground, or bruised my shin. Remember that? Courtship as a child was like warfare. Survive the pinches and name calling, the hair pulling and gossip, and you became a couple. For a few weeks, yeah? Then it got too scary for the boy, or too boring for the girl, and one or the other would break it off. Go back to being sworn enemies.

But how the heart would buzz for those few weeks. The head swoon. A dizzying rush of unbridled emotion, like a drowning, it was. The centre of the world. The star in one’s own love story. At least that’s how it felt to me. And I wrote it all down in this little book with a simple, unnecessary lock, for I had no one to protect it from. No one who would have cared to read it. And I’d smear the pages with perfume I pinched from my mum. Some dusty glass bottle meant to look like crystal, but cast in a plastic factory and kept on her dresser as ornamentation. A show of sophistication that produced the opposite effect. Poor Mum.

Scribbling words in the flowery cursive I’ve since abandoned, like giddy and throbbing and gushing and forever. Sealed with cheap factory perfume. An eleven-year-old’s ode to love.