Then one day my mom decided to read my diary. I guess whatever I had written did not sit well with her and she became very upset. I tried to explain that I wrote when I was angry, sad, excited, and elated - therefore whatever I had written was probably exaggerated!
Nothing seemed to calm her down, so the next day I took that diary and all the other journals to school with me. I would hide them in my locker instead of under my mattress so that she couldn't find them. Fortunately, no one ever found a need to break into my locker!
The end of the school year came along a few months later. I was graduating from high school and would probably never see a locker again. I began throwing things into the nearby garbage can - folders, old reports, old handouts. But then I got to the diaries.
Should I take them home and find a new hiding place for them?
What I did next, I will regret for the rest of my life. I chucked them into that garbage can.
I will never remember exactly how I felt the first day of high school. I will never remember the exact words a boy used to tell me he liked me. Never again will I know the exact order of songs I loved in 1991.
I've kept journals since then, but I never wrote in them as honestly and openly as I had before I knew my mom would read them. Some years I wrote nothing at all because there was nothing I wanted to remember. The books I kept from 1984-1995 may be lost treasure, but it only makes it more fun when a memory is conjured up :)
