Opening Pandora’s Notebooks

So.

Here I am.

Twenty journals on the floor like they staged an intervention. Every one of them thick with handwriting, crossed-out hope, and a younger version of me who thought closure was something you earned instead of survived.

Where do you even begin with a life you already know ends in ache?

Chronological seems responsible. Sensible. Like filing taxes on heartbreak. Start at the beginning, move politely through the middle, end exactly where things fall apart. Very adult. Very emotionally dangerous.

Or…

I could grab one at random. Chaos method.

Popcorn memories flying in every direction — first kisses next to final goodbyes, devotion rubbing shoulders with distance, twenty-year-old innocence flirting with forty-year-old restraint. A psychological obstacle course disguised as nostalgia.

Fun.

Tragic.

Probably unwise.

Each journal looks at me like it remembers something I tried very hard to forget. They don’t whisper.

They threaten.

Open me. Bleed a little.

Because that’s the problem with remembering him — it isn’t polite. It doesn’t knock. It reopens rooms I spent years carefully redecorating. Suddenly I miss the way he said my name. Suddenly silence feels crowded. Suddenly I’m measuring time by who I was when he last loved me properly.

Which version of us do I want today?

The hopeful one?

The reckless one?

The loyal-to-a-fault one?

The girl who thought timing was a minor inconvenience instead of a lifestyle?

Or do I go straight for damage? Flip to the pages where his absence learned new ways to hurt me? Where devotion quietly evolved into endurance? Where I pretended strength was the same thing as staying?

Romantic choice: Start at the beginning.

Masochistic choice: Start where it broke.

Unhinged choice: Close my eyes and trust fate with paper cuts and emotional whiplash.

Because here’s the real question:

Why am I doing this?

Healing?

Research?

Sentimentality?

Or just missing him in a socially acceptable, leather-bound format?

Yup. I just said that.

I sit here with twenty journals full of our love and our legacy — and I don’t even know if he still think of me. My soul says yes in that annoying confident way it always has. My heart, older and better insured, throws up a very professional no and reminds me of all the times intuition confused itself with hope.

Rude, but fair.

Still… if memory had a scent, his would already be in the room. I haven’t opened a single page and somehow he is here — leaning against the past like he never learned how to leave properly.

So where do I begin?

At hello?

At goodbye?

At the lie that said we were finished?

Or at the truth that keeps pretending we aren’t?

I take a breath.

Pick up a journal.

And negotiate with time like it owes me answers.

And so it begins ...