It was on my ninetieth page that I discovered the meaning of isolation.
In fact, immediately after the last trailing dot pinged at the bottom of my page. After so many weeks, maybe months, I learned what Julia tried so hard to explain to me along the lines of the old, scribbled notebook I became. An agenda. Not even a diary. Well, I discovered, with Julia's help as well, that “diary is the notebook I write every day, and I don't write on you every day”. Maybe diary is synonymous with twitter. Every time Julia wrote me she talked about her having said “all of this” on twitter. She must write on it every day. As a diary, notebook or journal – and then I remember old friends from the stationery shop – I must have fulfilled my function of gathering notes well. Join letters, with words, in sentences and sentences, paragraphs and ideas. Embrace them. Safeguarding them but not understanding them. I tried, somehow, to play my role – and what a great irony to define my role in this way, since I am nothing more than paper – to take care, with attention and zeal, of the secrets that were told to me.
For two years I lived in isolation, and I didn't even know it. As I left isolation, I fulfilled my function for another 30 sheets.
Julia, in the last 30 sheets of my existence – and maybe it's better to tell it that way, because only in this way I can understand and materialize time – vented about the anguish generated by the lack of sociability. I, silly piece of ex-tree, didn't even understand her whining. Saudade is a difficult word to understand when your constitution lacks a heart. Julia said about the longing, all the sheets she wrote to me. Julia complained about not being able to move and being tired of being “in the same house for so many months”. I've been in the drawer, but I don't know how many months. I don't know how many sheets I have been in the drawer, as I have none left. Now I understand the anguish of isolation. But I don't worry. Because I became a memoir, not a notebook anymore. Notes were scrawled for me across ninety sheets. Limitation of service life, obsolescence. The dark of the drawer and the thin-legged spiders that sew webs on my back cover, full of stickers that scratch my spine, are my faithful companions. Fulfilling its functions. After all, maybe I didn't even have a role. I would be assigned the role set for me by anyone who took me off the stationery shelf, passed me by the cashier, and completed the barter with a few change of coins.
Julia was the one who set me up for the role. Possibly I fulfilled this function. And my resignification is only up to me. I stop being a notebook with sheets lined with blue lines, I become the tactile memory of a girl in isolation.
In my last lines, Julia said she was reading "The Diary of Anne Frank". I doubt that Anne Frank wrote in her diary every day. But it fulfilled its function of annotating, agglomerating, assembling, storing and lasting memories. Like any diary does. As I did for 90 sheets and will continue to do so, because every record in me has become history. Except for the stickers on the spine, they are uncomfortable.
And maybe even twitter can be a bit of a memory record. But I doubt that people smell its sheets when they take it off the stationery shelf like they do to me.
Comments