The Journal

Blank, empty, soulless, nothing but page after page of lined paper pressed tightly between my covers. My patterned cover attracts a young girl. She picks me up, and runs her hands across the cover and along my spiral edge which binds me. She flips me open and ruffles my pages. I revel in the caress of air around my still leaves. She traces the tips of her fingers along my lined pages. Suddenly I realized something lacked within me, and it pains me to be without it. I still did not know what it was. I only knew, as the girl ran her fingers across me, that she could give me something I needed.

I was expecting to be fill up right then, my pages nearly rustled with my excitement, but the girl closes me with a harsh "snap!" I am placed in a bag that rustles and crinkles. I stay there for a while, wishing for the girl to pick me up again. Eventually she does, but not to open and fill me, but to give me to another, who waves me around under a  red light. I am handed back to the girl, and placed once again in the bag. I swing, sit, jerk, and tumble in the bag as I am taken somewhere. I know not where.

Finally, being taken out of the bag, I am placed on a shelf by the girl, and that is all.

I wait.

Before the girl, I had sat on a shelf, my only knowledge of the world the other books which were around me, which I know realize where just as empty as I am. It makes me wonder if they too feel the emptiness inside of them and wished to be filled. Now though, I am surrounded by all sorts of companions.

I wait.

They are very worldly and kowledgable, these other books. Some are story books. They are full of character and plots. Other are picture books. They show amazing scenes of the world, capturing a singe moment of life on their pages. They whisper things to me, telling me of the world. Some laugh at me, mocking my bare pages, tittering about the dullness of my repetitive lines. They say what point can there be in a book like me?

I wait.

Others comfort me. They search their own pages for clues to what I am, and how I am to be filled. They never found out though. The books come and go. Sometimes I lose a friend, sometimes I gain one.

I wait.

And then...

Then girl picks me up, only she is different, unlike me; I have not changed at all. She opens me and I think she is going to trace my lines again, but instead she lays me on a table. Gently, she places the tip of a pen a little above the very first line, on my very first page, and then she writes...

                    I had forgotten about his journal, lost among the regular books on my

                    shelf. I needed I new journal, and I happened to find you...

The girl was filling me! Filling me with words, wonderful words she means for me and only me. Line by line and page be page.

The girl places me back on the shelf and I show the others the few pages the girl had filled with her messy script. I can talk about nothing else.

I grow thicker, as if the words the girl writes in me somehow add substance to me. It isn't everyday the  girl writes, but she does several times a week, filling me with more of her words.

Then the day comes when the girl writes upon the last line of my last page. She closes me, and places me on the shelf again. For a moment, just before she put me down, she ran her fingers along my spine and cover, like she had done the day she first picked me up.

I never felt the girl's touch again. A few other people picked me up casually, even flipped open my pages, but never with the tenderness of the girl.

But it doesn't end there, for I tell others of the girl who filled me. Like a picture I have captured her, and like a story I tell her adventures. But more than that is laced through my pages. The girl herself lives in me, her heart beating and her laugh echoing. I am her dreams, her fears, her sorrows, her joys, her wishes, triumphs, failures, life, losses, and loves. Even as the girl changes and fades, I will hold her, young and vibrant.

Forever.