Little brown book

I was feeling lonely tonight. In an apartment full of people - it's a long story, maybe I'll write about it some other time how I live with a whole family from Iowa these days - I felt disconnected from them and just wanted to be alone. It's funny - or rather sad - how lonely it is sometimes in a crowd. I tried to write something. Not this, I had started another post some time ago. About loneliness. The human condition. Something about every person being on the bottom of a well. One well per person. Trying desperately to scream so other well-dwellers could hear. Silly.

Then I remembered something. I have this book somewhere I used to write a journal in. I also put all kinds of clippings, pictures, notes in there. Things nobody else is supposed to see but I figured I might want to read them or look at them at some point in the future again. I started looking for it. Must not have looked at it since I moved into this apartment because it took a long time to figure out that it was packed away in a box under my bed. But I found it eventually. It's this light brown leather book with a sticker of Tiger on the cover. Clearly a child's property. The entries start in 2000. They are rather embarrassing to read today. Even just to myself. It's the other things in there that I love looking at. Some newspaper clippings of teenage crushes. Actors and fencers. I had a crush on this German foil fencer for a while. We used to go to world cups in Budapest and watch the really good fencers. They were celebrities to us. There is a poem from my best friend Szidi she wrote on a piece of paper for me for a birthday. It says our friendship will last a lifetime. It makes me smile even today, we are still very close friends. Then there is a picture of an award ceremony: it's the under-17 women's foil final of the Hungarian National Championships from 2000. On the picture, which is printed on plain paper, I am on the podium, in 2nd place. It's all good except that I won that tournament. The picture was photoshopped by the father of the girl who actually got 2nd; on this version she is on top of the podium. He gave this printed photo to me at the next competition, as a joke. At 17, it's really hard to lose. It was one of those "never give up until the very last touch" bouts. I was behind by so many points after the first period of fencing that my coach, instead of the usual yelling and screaming, just told me he did not think it was worth to stay for the rest of the match and so walked out without a word of advice. Apparently that was all I needed. He didn't even realize I had won until he stumbled back into the room some time later, completely wasted, and I had a gold medal hanging around my neck. To make it seem like he had something to do with my victory, he claimed it was his leaving that motivated me. Right. Among the rest of the girls on the picture is Szidi in 5th place - one of the rare times I finished ahead of her. Then there is another friend, Bobe in 6th. She would end up in college in the US as well and we had competed against each other many more times in collegiate fencing after that year. She also, a few months later, beat me by one touch at the last competition of the season to qualify for world championships. That would have been my only chance to represent Hungary on a national team. In 7th place is Mariann, who just weeks after this picture was taken, passed away at a tournament in Bratislava, a day before her 17th birthday. Memories. It's been nearly 12 years, 12 years that she didn't get to live.

The last thing I found in the book was a 3-page note written on the back of a flight itinerary print-out. NYC-Chicago-NYC round trip from 2008. While flying back from Chicago I didn't have anything else to write on and I needed to get some thoughts out of my head and onto paper. Reading those 3 pages now made me weep. Mostly because I seemed to have had insight into something I could not have foreseen at the time. And yet I did almost perfectly. And in the nearly three and half years since then, memories in fact have been altered greatly. Our brains are like built-in time machines: except when we time travel, we have the ability to change the past to make it brighter, darker, more or less painful, or whatever way might benefit us in the long run. So keeping this little brown book is not such a bad idea; it might preserve some things I probably shouldn't forget or alter in memory.