Take Another Little Piece of My Heart… And Paint It With Watercolors

So, I chopped up Sid.

For those of you who don’t know, Sid was my journal. I’ve had him for ten years, and he was twelve books and over 3,000 pages long.

I can hear some of my friends screaming in horror right now, but don’t worry, I didn’t chop up the whole thing. There are a few years that are, shall we say, hazy, to some of my friends, and they depend on Sid to relive those memories that they don’t remember living in the first place.

Since I’ve had this journal for about as long as I’ve known most of my friends, they also rely on it to settle arguments with each other, like it’s the world’s most obscure court transcript or something:

“No, YOU SAID – (ahem) Stephie, can you go get Sid, please?”

Those will get chopped up eventually. I’m trying to keep the teenager ones around as long as possible to prepare myself for raising one. Instead of wondering why they’re so crazy, I can just flip through and be like, “Oh… right.” But it will be destroyed before it becomes Leverage.

SID doesn’t stand for anything. I started writing it the same week I discovered the Sex Pistols, so I guess I thought I was being bad-ass in that My So-Called Life kind of way. Or whatever. Liz swears up and down that it stands for “Stephanie’s Intimate Diaries”, which totally grosses me out. “Intimate” is one of those words that makes me feel uncomfortable and yicky, like “Moist”.

I didn’t really chop it up for any ceremonial reason… I had an idea for an art project that required little bits of paper, and at the same time, I was getting really sick of these books lying around that I never wanted to read again. So it was kind of a chicken-and-the-egg decision.

It was a really weird process skimming those pages and cutting them up. I was on the phone catching up with Kyle and TSGoC for most of it, so I was too preoccupied to try and turn it into any emotional touchstone or cleansing or whatever. It was just paper. A lot of it.

However, I DID end up realizing and learning a lot of things – whether I wanted to or not. I’ll write about that next time.

And it’s funny – I’ll reach in and grab one – this tiny scrap of paper with little sentence fragments all out of order – and I’ll spot one name or a combination of words and I’ll know exactly where it’s from. I can immediately see that entry in my head: where I was in my life when I wrote it, who it’s about, things that happened before and after, and sometimes I’ll even remember the exact moment I sat down to write it.

So it’s not like I’m throwing those memories away… they’ve always been there, and I suppose they always will be. They’re just getting put to good use, is all.