How Do You Keep a Diary When You Don’t Even Know What Day It Is?

I think I was able to make it through the first year solely on the promised delight of the second lap, when days would align or differences would emerge. Now in my third year, I do sometimes make my boyfriend guess what we were doing a year or two ago. But he has a really good memory and we go to a particular Taiwanese restaurant with astounding frequency, so it’s usually an anti-climactic exercise. Mostly, I’ve found the previous entries way less compelling than I thought they’d be.

“At first I loved only the physicality of the diary...I liked its miserable condition,” Kathryn Scanlan writes of the water-logged, crumbling artifact she took home from an estate sale fifteen years earlier. But eventually she reads it, pulling out her favorite sentences and, over the course of a decade, arranging and rearranging them. The resulting book, Aug 9-Fog, is drawn from the five-year diary of an 86-year-old woman in a small Midwestern town, started in 1968. “A contemporary vendor of this type of diary claims the format allows you to ‘travel forward and back in time,’” Scanlan writes in the introduction to a work that's both nonfiction and fictional, diary and collage.

Last week, I planned to write a friend in lockdown in Italy. On the fourth day I somehow hadn’t, I noticed that in my diary, exactly two years before, we were having dinner together. So I wrote to say that and send love. It’s hard to know how to sign off emails these days. Thankfully, there’s no room in my diary for a sign off.

“The diarist's voice, her particular use of language, is firmly, intractably lodged in my head,” Scanlan writes in the introduction. “Often I say to myself—‘some hot nite’ or ‘flowers coming fast’ or ‘grass sure growing’ or ‘everything loose is traveling.’ I have possessed this work so thoroughly that the diarist has ceased to be an entirely unique, autonomous other to me. I don't picture her. I am her.”

But just as Scanlan and her diarist merge, I find diary-me and real-me peeling apart. In this unbearable present, wondering what this time will look like from the future, I feel more distant than ever from the entries written in my hand days and weeks ago. I bought soap shaped like an ear in Mexico City, but it’s hard to believe that was this spring. I made a warm farro and fennel salad, but what a strange way to mark a day otherwise filled with clawing anxiety. What do you write when you don’t know what’s happening?

“I began writing in my journal every evening — the word NOTHING in big underlined capital letters. I would wake up in the middle of the night and know that ‘nothing’ had happened.” So begins Annie Ernaux’s Happening. The something she’s waiting for is a period that doesn’t come. In this slip of a book translated by Tanya Leslie, Ernaux revisits the abortion she had in 1963 as a college student in France when the medical procedure was illegal.

“I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there,” Ernaux writes. Her efforts include “revist[ing] every single image” and “the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror and sweetness.” But her diary, which serves as “evidence,” is surprisingly full of absences.

I tracked the virus but wrote about the moon. It was weeks before “corona” appeared in my diary. March 5th, first mention. March 9th, second. March 16th, the term “social distancing.” Re-reading recent entries, it's clear I’m trying to find something to hold onto, even when writing about the same subjects as before. January: Saw three crows having a meeting. Mid-March: Paying more attention to birds.

I’m terrified of what’s still to come, so I paw around trying to figure out how I’ll understand today from the distance of a year. It’s impossible, of course. When I picked up my copy of Happening last week, I was struck by what appears, fittingly, before anything begins. An epigraph, Yūko Tsushima; “I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end.”

Until then, more entries. I saw a cottontail. It rained. Like Scanlan’s flowers, the news came faster and faster.

Alex Ronan is a writer and reporter from New York.