The Real Folk Blues

When I first read the news I curled up and cried. It has taken me days to accept this and to be able to sit and write this final entry.

This diary has been my safe place, my way of dealing with all of the crap inside of my head and in my life. 10 years of my life are here, and I never once thought it would go away. Even just writing this I am tearing up.

With every thing this has been home. Even when I was not writing as much I was here, my dairy was here. That along kept me feeling connected to that distant idea of “home.”

I started back in 2004 when the site has it’s official crash and lost my first few months of writing. I started over again. This time, I am not sure how to start over.

Here I tracked my depression and recovery. I wrote about my search for a teaching position, that day I was offered a job – and now nine years of teaching in my school. I’ve written about my family, about myself, about Honor Flight, about my dog Magic, about useless things and meaningful things. I just wrote, and while it may not have been good writing it was good for me.

1,111 entries now. What lovely symmetry when things are about to end but I cannot help but feel that there should be more. I look back and very little about my diary has changed from the start – I have the same name, same dairy title, and same information on my front page as when I started. It took me forever to finally create a layout that was meaningful to me, that I have kept for years with no changes.

Like every person who writes, I left my mark here. I left pieces of myself in a place where I could come and pick them up again. I could take them and hold them up to the new light of time passed, look at them with new eyes and a clear mind. I left pieces of myself in a place I believed was safe, would always be safe – to save those parts that I felt I did not or should not forget.

Now they will leave this place. They will become a part of that past that is harder to remember, surrounded in mist of time passing and life moving on towards something else.

I do not want to forget those pieces. Even the broken ones – they lead me to who I am now. And I am afraid. Afraid that I will forget those pieces of myself. Here they are kept fresh, they are captured in time and held in place, however the human mind is a terrible thing – it glosses over and files away so many things, and the things that were once important are gone unless there is something, a reminder, to draw them up again. That is what this diary is to me. A reminder of who I was then, so I can remind myself who I am now when I start to feel lost again.

At the same time I am more afraid to lose the people though. There are friends and family here to. People who were part of my life who are gone now for one reason or another. Friends in my life away from here, and some dear friends who were here once and seem to have gone away. I have written them here, saved those memories to come back to because I know that life moves forward and again pieces get left behind. I may have lost the people from my life, but I do not want to lose the affect they had on me, and again I am afraid that will fade away as well.

Since the news broke I have seen a lot of people jumping to prosebox, but I checked out that site and I hate it. It is cold and uninviting and does not feel right. This evening I found a rumor of EWS starting something here: Future home of something quite cool It seems he is trying to recreate the better parts of here elsewhere – and I would like to see how that goes. Maybe there I could find a new home.

I do not know if I have any friends left here, but if you want to reach me for now my email is RavenUsher@gmail.com

OpenDiary has been my homepage for 10 years on every computer I have ever had. The day I pull up my internet browser and it is gone is going to feel like yet another death of someone I have cared about.

This will be my last entry here, and I do not want to stop writing. I do not want to hit save because that will be goodbye. I have always hated goodbyes and endings. I do not know if I have it in me to start again.

I will leave how I started – my first entry so many years ago was about an anime – CowboyBebop. I have loved that story for longer than I have been here, but I find parallels between the end of it and how I feel OD is ending.

“The music box is broken. Or is it? It starts to play and a haunting tune fills the air. I awake suddenly from my dream, there is no music box Yet there it is a tiny one nestled in my hand. And I awake from my dream again, as if I were peeling away an onion. Its a dream no matter how far I go. I can never reach reality, trapped in an endless nightmare.”