Remind me

I've been reading other women's diaries for years - the fluorescent life of my teenage sister in the 1980s, the fleshy, pink pages of Anais Nin's lifetime of journals, the depressive, literary recordings of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, or, as is currently the case, Simone de Beauvoir's Journal de guerre. But on my recent visit to Australia, I read my own diaries.

When I left Sydney five years ago I entrusted my diaries - commenced at the age of eight - to a friend, not so much because I had confidence in his high moral standards which would prevent him from having a peek, but rather I trusted he would restrain himself due to complete and utter disinterest.

December 2006, Sydney, we arranged to meet up in one of our old drinking bars. He was late and from my second-floor corner of Oxford Street I watched the nightly migration of the flying foxes in the grey-swept sky as they made their way from the trees of the Botanical Gardens up to Centennial Park (apparently there are better night clubs up that way). After the one-kiss greeting Sydney style, my friend handed me a backpack full of diaries which had been catching mould in his family bathroom for the past five years. Are you sure you'll be able to carry that home? It's rather heavy, weighed down with neuroses.

Back in my suburban bedroom in the family home where lots of those words were written, I began to read.

Sometimes it was like reading the diaries of a stranger as characters in the pages had been forgotten and I had to text around to friends: who was this? what was that?

Sometimes it was like watching a film or reading a book with an unconvincing character who can't see something which is bleedingly obvious to the audience. There were pages and pages about someone buried in my first year of university called Andrew (a veritable cherub if we are to believe the descriptions of his cherry-stained lips and crown of ringlets) who was so clearly in to me: "He was waiting near the fountain at uni and he said to me `I thought you'd come past here - do you want to have lunch?' But I don't think he likes me". "He said I looked really pretty today. But I don't think he likes me." "He said he likes me, but I don't think he does."

Needless to say, nothing ever happened between us. I was straight out of an all girls catholic school and apparently new to the workings of the male mind, as well as very insecure. But there was something refreshing about this innocence. Going back to my first years of teenhood I found an amusing entry:

"I had a slightly spooky experience on the way in to the city today. I was sitting alone in a train carriage except for a man sitting across from me with his front teeth missing. He kept looking at me. I don’t know for sure that his look was sexual, but I guessed it was."

And? And that, apparently, was the spooky experience.

Naturally the diaries change over the years, with the latter diaries of my mid-twenties more closely resembling the me of today, but there seems to be a recurrent theme in them all. I was always fat (just quietly: I was never fat), a crop of pimples was always threatening my sanity, I longed to be prone to vigorous exercise (to lose the fat), and I often said things along the lines of: I am a pile of dirt and I must clean myself. Apparently my psyche was also damaged.

Sitting in my old room among florals and bears I started forgetting who I am now and started to feel that the characters waking up on the pages still exist for me now as they did back then, that I could walk out the door and find them all again. I started sending sentimental texts to anyone I could still contact. I was determined to construct a time machine. It reminded me of that Royksopp song:

"It's only been a week,
The rush of being home in rapid fading.
Prevailing to recall
What I was missing, all that time in England

Has sent me aimlessly,
On foot or by the help of transportation,
To knock on windows where
A friend no longer live, I had forgotten.

And everywhere I go,
There's always something to remind me
Of another place and time"