The Diary

Evelyn,

I had found the diary by coincidence it seemed, walking one day, dirty (it was raining heavily), mud caking to my shoes along the wood-trails of Van Cortlandt Park.  Brad had favored Central Park for the duration of our time in New York, as most New Yorkers do, but I had found myself taking the train to Woodlawn Heights at first weekly, and then daily the second winter we were there.

The winter was still, and so I was driven out onto the street.  We were alone, also; no more wives or girlfriends for that time until they would return in the new year.  It was only the three of us, liberated for the first time, yes, but beginning to feel it's eventual sting of isolation.  And so I became acquainted, rather intimately, with the John Muir trail.

As I said, it had been raining.  The woods dripped a morose way near the aqueduct, and it was nearby when I spotted it - a flash of red which made my heart stop.  I thought at first it was a cardinal, or stray graffiti, but it was somehow smooth and reflective, and therefore artificial.  It was coming up out of the ground, as if it could not stay buried where it was (a trait I would come to know is yours in singularity).

You may be curious to know exactly how rain affects the colors around us.  In the dimmer lights filtered by clouds, I was told once it allows our eyes to better interpret and differentiate color.  In the rain, when senses are heightened thus, my favorite things to examine are soil, and stone.

Under the fluorescent greens, I saw amid the dung brown and vivid mulch of the leaves of the foregone autumn, the plastic bag protecting a corner of the diary.  I dug it loose with my hands, mucking it from it's casket.  It was the color of all my thoughts, interrupted.  The color of my heart stopping.

When I had pulled it loose, I took it with me to the creek and washed the grime from it and my hands before opening it, to examine the contents.

The interior of the bag had no scent but plastic.  When I saw the writing within begin at the top of the first page, aching girlish in loops of uncertainty, I closed it without reading the words at all.  You see, I realize I had committed a terrible sin.