I've been updating myself on the world of online journals, as I left it some time ago, perhaps a year or maybe even more? I don't know, and I am steadfastly not going to check, because it seems pointless to know exactly when. Forever ago. Last fall or summer, maybe. But anyway, I quit writing in my own, having quit reading anyone else's months before, and let it all drift away.

So I've been looking around and there are many journals, many many more than when I started my first journal so long ago, almost three years exactly (a little more than three by a few weeks), and was the one hundred fifty-first person to join Open Pages, and I wrote every day except for the weekends (more or less), passionately and fiercely, trying to figure out what was going on and who I was and all of that sort of thing. Oh, it makes me sad to think about it, not in a bone-deep way but very lightly, moth-wing sadness which touches my eyes so delicately that I feel like I am just about to cry despite being completely dry.

Why so sad? I don't know. Maybe because that girl had just started therapy (with the therapist who didn't work out, actually, but that's another story) and had no idea all the things she was going to find out about herself and her life. And I really don't want to get into any of that here, because I have enough of thinking about therapy in the rest of my life, but it permeates everything.

Sad, perhaps, right now, for that girl who started that journal and was so terrified of her own emotions she could never feel sadness. Sad because I can be, gloriously sad, like Lin Dai-Yu who in her life as a flower was wept upon by a stone until she awoke and grew to love him, and in her life as a mortal had to repay the now-human stone by shedding tears for him constantly -- she cried at everything, at the sound of his voice, at the sight of the moon, at the flower blossoms fallen from the trees in autumn -- like Browning's Last Duchess, except with tears instead of smiles. Beautifully, gloriously sad. My moth-wing sadness is a pale shadow of that, but still something to be savoured, cherished, held close to me and then gently let go of. I'm going through my list of online journals, deleting all the bookmarks to sites now closed or simply gone, and I am sad that time has passed when I did not write, and that I am not as innocent as I once was about who has loved me and who has hurt me, and I am sad because I can be sad, and still love my life and the world and many of the people in it. I'm sad and it's glorious, because I know that I'm so much more alive than I used to be.

I just got back from Andrea's show, a few hours ago, and have been messing around with the computer and sneezing fiercely ever since. Unrelated, I assure you. The show was amazing. I told Andrea this, and she told me I was a sweet girl, which may well be true, but nonetheless does not alter the fact that her show was actually amazing. I had heard little bits and pieces of it before, over time, but it was different to hear and see it all at once, flowing from beginning to breathlessly intense end, and with an audience to whom Andrea is just a person, an actress performing instead of a friend. Really, it was amazing. I don't want to wait to see her do more.

The sneezing and the computer and Andrea's show may all be unrelated, but I have quickly discovered that it is nigh impossible to write coherent long sentences when one has to stop every five words and desperately grab a kleenex. Why are my allergy pills suddenly not working? Unfair. I guess I'll go back to surfing the web.

Oh, all right, one last thought. I gave someone pause with one of my entries. It is nice, sometimes, to know that one's writing can give pause. Even if one might rather never give pause at all to those one cares about.