I’ve been working on a fiction project which is pretty loosely fictionalized memoir. It’s drawn from my own life. It’s a catalog – Amina was doing a catalog story when I was with her in Ithaca, too.

Every time one of a particular kind of event happens, you write about it. But you don’t have to join them together. So you could do a catalog of the best meals you’ve ever had in your life, and write only about them. Or every time you’ve thrown up from drinking. Or every injury or major sickness.

I’ve been having a lot of success writing this catalog so far, but as I catch up to the present I find myself having a lot of trouble continuing it.

I tried to write in my journal first, but that meant acknowledging something had happened and it affected me personally, which hurt. So then I tried to write in the Word document on the computer, but that meant distancing myself from it, which felt cold and detatched. I don’t have the right medium in which to write about these things. Paper is too personal. The computer is too official.

And now I’m blogging about the difficulty of writing about it. Which feels like the perfect combination of journaling and typing.

If you don’t write about something, can you make it disappear from your memory? Does the absence of a record make it less real? And as a writer, do you ever get to forget? Will I ever be satisfied until I manage to write about this? Why do I end my blog entries with questions I already know the answers to?
(No, or at least I can’t. Yes, it does. No. No. And, to avoid answering them.)