In the little drawer beside her bed, nestled among an errant scrap of heirloom lace and a few trinkets of girlhood, sat an old journal, its leather face was worn at the edges, the pages yellowed with age. Of the few memories left resonating in her cluttered mind, the day she had received the lovely little book was clear as yesterday: her eighth birthday, a year before the sickness took her mother. The celebration had been modest as always, recycled paper crowns and a cake so small there was barely enough for the four of them. Mom had placed a little rectangle wrapped in brown paper, with a mountain laurel secured to its face with twine, its delicate pink-tinged petals still vibrant from the earth. She had opened the paper carefully, thrilled by the spine and pages that promised adventure within, but her smile faded when she saw that the pages were blank. "But where are the stories?" she asked.
Her mother had smoothed her strawberry curls reassuringly. "This is a special book," she explained. "It's waiting for you to write stories of your own."
The first few pages were filled with the cramped, impatient lettering of a child, telling tales of pirates and monsters and far off lands. But soon, fairy stories gave way to everyday tragedies, and the pages that followed contained the story of her life: her mother's passing, as described by a confused child for whom the wound would never fully heal; schoolyard tifts with friends whose names would have escaped her had they not been memorialized in blotchy ink; her first brush with womanhood, with a freckled boy a year ahead of her in school who'd lost interest when she'd bled their first time, and was nowhere to be found when her belly began to swell in the weeks that followed; the inexplicable sadness when she'd been unable to sustain the life growing inside of her—only these pages knew that she'd intended to name the child Helen, after her mother; the excitement when Douglas came into her life, and the seemingly endless regret when he had married so quickly after she had chosen her drunken father over him in the wake of Fred's death.
She hadn't written much, after that. Yet safe in the drawer it continued to sit, and every so often she would lift it from its nest and flip through its musty pages, once so full of promise, and revel in tales of a life half-lived. There was a certain peace in abandoned melancholy that made the mundanity of her spinster's life all the easier to swallow somehow, and she couldn't help but imagine her mother smiling down at each smudge and ink blossom, proud of her headstrong daughter in spite of (or perhaps because of) all the hardship she had been forced to endure.
It was odd, then, as she settled into bed that cool Spring evening, that she found herself pulling open the drawer and retrieving the little book, flipping past page after page of a life that so often seemed to belong to someone else entirely, to touch her pen to the first blank page she came across.
"I met a young man today," she wrote, chastising herself for her sudden, inexplicable urge to document such an innocuous event. "He helped Dad through another drunken night at the legion hall. He introduced himself as Richard Harrow, and I can't stop thinking about how much I'd like to see him again." Somehow, she knew this would be a story her mother would love.