Old Diaries Vol. 1
July 1995/August 2020
Wednesday, July 19, 1995 - Norfolk, England (11 years old)
Today we went to the beach. It was perfectly glorious. We swam without a bother in the sea. It was so warm. We had a lovely time playing on the sand. Me and Laura built a sand stables. When we got home, we went to feed Freddie but we didn’t ride him. Mammy and Daddy got back late. Me and Laura went down to greet them. We had cake and tea. They said they had presents for us which we could open tomorrow.
Thursday, August 6, 2020 - Charlottesville, VA
Today I am hundreds of miles inland from the nearest beach. A hurricane is traveling north northeast and a flash flood watch is in place for central and northern Virginia. It has been close to 100 degrees for what feels like months now. When the baby wakes up from his nap, I will assess once again whether it is too hot to take him out in his stroller. We won’t go far. We need to go outside to interrupt our housebound day. To make it to the next nap.
When I was a child, I wrote in my diary like I was a character in an Enid Blyton book. This entry, squeezed into the ‘Wednesday’ box in a business desk diary, gives the wrong impression of how I grew up, but I don’t feel like explaining why.
Because of how much I miss the sea, I am trying to remember the beach on the Norfolk coast where I built the sand stables with my cousin 25 years ago. If I remember the beach at Cromer, it is overlaid with a much later memory, a blustery day in early May of 2014, when Adam and I met my parents in Norfolk and tooled around for a weekend, driving and stopping and driving again, lunches and pints, then back to London on the train. Or, the image of that beach in my mind might be a black and white photograph from Rings of Saturn, from the camera of Sebald. The original image won’t come to me, the lovely time spent playing in the sand, the swimming without a bother. It seems to go without saying that I would give up many luxuries to be able to spend a day like that again, not least in order to introduce my son to the ocean, an introduction that has been delayed indefinitely by the slow, painful, and chaotic collapse of American society. We’re trapped here, for reasons ranging from the truly global (a pandemic) to the irritatingly local (Elliott doesn’t have a passport yet).
I have this persistent thought: I am not able. I am not able to write. I am not able to work. I am not able to walk without pain or sleep without medication or read a book without stopping to check the baby monitor every few minutes. I am not able to leave the house because the heat is telling me something about how humans shouldn’t be trying to live in a place like this anymore. I am not able to leave this place. I am not able to work from home and look after the baby at the same time. I am not able to send him to daycare because the risks are too great. I am not able.
The months after Elliott was born are a blur, and those months bleed into the present as if he just arrived, as if he isn’t eight months old already and commando crawling his way across entire rooms. My son is racing to become a little boy, and I am waiting to feel able. For a few months, I was able to do this much: write daily diary entries with my thumb on my phone’s notes app while Elliott slept on my chest (the only way he would sleep for months). I am not able to work on my book, or write anything complex, but I am able to keep a diary.
All my life, I have been able to keep a diary. I have proof of hundreds, thousands of days when I was able to do that much. I’m not sure exactly why it feels necessary to share this diary-making in a newsletter, but this time of isolation has me craving connection. I’m sick of writing to myself. So please, write back to me. Tell me what you thought about today.
I’ll leave you with this, my most persistent fantasy, which takes place on a different beach: my son in wellies and a winter coat, toddling on the shore on Dollymount beach, stopping occasionally to pick up shells. The wind is salty and sharp on our ears and cheeks.
Your friend,
Helen.