Date a Girl Who Keeps a Diary.
source: weheartit.com
By Kelsey Burns
“They say it’s the good girls who keep diaries. The bad girls never have time.” ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Date a girl who remembers how to write in cursive. The capital G’s and the lowercase z’s. She doesn’t believe in margins or commas.
Words spill onto the next line and periods follow prepositions. Starting sentences with because and running them well beyond the second conjunction.
A girl who keeps a diary doesn’t write for likes, or comments, or followers. She writes because she has something to get out. To work through.
Date a girl who keeps a diary. She feels things more than your average person. From beginning to end. Maybe she has more nerve endings or maybe her skin is a layer thinner. Life sinks into her a little deeper.
You’ll see her in the window seat of the airplane, overflowing just a little. Messy scribbles on scraps of paper from the seat pocket. What she’s leaving behind, what she’s taking with her, what she hopes to find beyond the tarmac at the other end.
Ask her if she is afraid of someone reading her diary, and she will simply say No. Because her worst fear is not that someone knows about her routine crazy or crush on John Travolta or fear of inadequacy or the night she ate a full container of Cool Whip on the kitchen floor.
It would be far more dangerous to ignore what she really feels. It would be far more dangerous to passively float through life leaving the warring wonders unearthed.
Confess your love to her, mid-laugh, as you accelerate through the yellow light. Be her transparency and her adventure and her sophistication. Be her goofiness and favorite song and second language.
If you take up seven pages, you’re probably not him, because if you were him, you’d only take three words.
Find her sprawled out on the city patch of grass, breathing in Figure Eights. Great wide circles as people bustle by, as green stains her white dress.
She writes to slow it down, to let go and make some room. She rips out those busy pages and folds them in half before she slips them into the barrel marked Recycle.
Date the girl who asks you to read aloud to her as she puts her head in your lap and her French braid drapes over your knee.
She believes in juju and peanut butter and the night sky. She spent too much money on red sunflowers and bedroom sheets. Reads the last chapter first because, even though she won’t admit it, that’s the only one she really cares about.
She takes her time drinking her tea. Folding the laundry. She takes her time in Double Pigeon.
Watch her stand still in chaos and wait for the tears to come. It’s uncomfortable, but she breathes into it.
She knows the world can wait 20 minutes and nothing bad will happen. She doesn’t rush falling for you. She does it slowly so she can feel it intensely.
She might be a little hard to read. Be patient with her. She doesn’t need you to understand every time. To fix it every time.
She needs you to listen. Those conversations she avoids, have them with her. Remind her you can’t read her mind.
Date the good girl who writes bad things and shoves them under her mattress.
Her voice may be soft, but her pen screams.
She picks up her ballpoint pen and rids herself of what no longer serves her. She knows about heartbreak, devastation, sadness, and anger, but she closes the cover and chooses to be happy anyway.
Date a girl who keeps a diary, because she knows that life gets hard and words are cheap.
*****
Kelsey Burns is a not-so-recent college graduate who asks too many questions. She sins daily and gets lost constantly. Her first word was ‘More’ and she lives life looking for it. A short time ago, she began her career as a nurse in California. Someday she hopes to become a certified Yoga instructor, own an espresso machine, and turn 24. You can contact her via email.
{Write to Work Through}
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