A Thought On Journaling

My husband and I got married last year. This made time feel as though it was going by incredibly fast. Faster than I wanted it to. 

This sensation of speed seemed to happen at different levels. On one level, the wedding day itself went by like an F1 car. I experienced the glittering, roaring, intoxicating joy, but piecing together the details afterwards was hard. It was like I’d been breathing in for twelve months, preparing myself, and then exhaled it all in seconds. 

On a different level, the whole phenomenon of becoming engaged, planning a wedding, and that wedding suddenly being over, was involuntarily jarring. It felt like a kind of cosmic harbinger of life passing me by. 

The strange thing was, this elated, jubilant time served, in fact, to make me feel just as sad. I was fearful – fearful that it was a day I’d be looking back on when times just weren’t as good. A day which had served as an apotheosis. How would anything ever be that good? Had I experienced my lifetime's joy at its peak, before the inevitable sadness of personal disappointment, of old age, of loss, started to sink in? 

I knew a lot of people experienced these feelings after their wedding. And the old adage goes that, once you’ve hit your thirties, you start (finally) growing up. These reassurances were fine, but I found them unhelpful in resolving the actual issue at hand: the fact that I was in a tussle with time passing, because it no longer felt like it was passing. It felt like it was running out. 

My main thought through all of this was, “I wish I’d kept a diary.” I realised that time seemed much more intimidating and nebulous because that sanctified day I’d invested so much love, care and consciousness into was starting to fade in my memory. The days before were paling into a milky fug, and the possibility I might forget, not just the practicalities of the day, but how it felt, was by far the most terrifying, heart-wrenching thing. 

Ruminating on this, I came home from work early one day in the midst of the heat wave. Trying to work from the sofa, I found my mind circumventing the immediate task and settled on tidying the desk as a byway to achieving productivity. 

In the top drawer, I found a journal I’d kept from 2024, the year we became engaged. I opened it to find some scribbled entries from a walking holiday we’d done together in the summer of that year. 

For the next hour, I sat and read, and in the process of reading, was transported to a vibrant simulacrum of that week in my mind; small details recorded – I remember – with a determination not to let them slip away. And I realised, by recording them and re-reading them now, they had not. 

Small remembrances of people we’d met; the sound of voices; smells in the air; the decor of rooms we’d stayed in; meals we’d had together; words we’d exchanged and – most poignantly – how I’d felt. I felt myself returning to those moments emotionally. Recollections not only in memory, but in sensation; I felt something deep and sore in my chest as I remembered fondly time we’d spent together, now consigned to scrawls on a page. But, crucially, not consigned to the past; not fated to fade. 

Here, on a Tuesday afternoon in summer two years later, I felt those moments again, and allowed that time to inform my present, to govern how I felt now.  For a moment, that walking holiday was with me again. And I was richer for it. 

In realising this, I became fearful at the thought of those things that had gone unrecorded. By not writing them down, by not weaving a rope with which to pull them from the gloom as years passed, what had I risked never visiting again? 

It struck me that the fear of losing the past is one we have the power to counteract. If something is preserved it cannot be lost. And the shape of those scrawled letters on the page, I came to realise, held the undulating lines, the landscapes and cadences of my past living. A porthole back, not just to a time, but to a state of being.

BY FREYA MORRIS