A few days earlier, I was diagnosed with a rare malignant tumor in the back of my eye, and I was in the limbo between surgery and radiation. I did not yet know that this thing was not likely to kill me. It was not the first time the thought of death had merged with the thought of the journals. Over the years, when I had been on particularly turbulent flights, feeling a jet shudder and bounce, flight attendants strapped into their jump seats projecting calm, my terrified mind would inevitably leap to the third shelf in my office closet. My journals! Why had I kept them? Why, if, as I was certain, I never wanted a soul to read them?

We’ll never know. But perhaps it’s in the very act of keeping a diary — “keep” being the operative word — that we stay on nodding terms with all our selves, rather than neatly excising the gnarly or embarrassing bits. That we own our flawed, messy narrative rather than burn it, shred it, throw it away. That we understand that we aren’t defined by one chapter or mistake or foolish way of being. Whether we encounter our own long-ago words or our children do or our grandchildren or a world of rapt strangers, perhaps it is in this dialogue of one — unpolished, raw, without discipline — that we offer testimony into the void. That we say: This is me. I was human. And so are you.