Renae Reints


She writes everything down because she’s afraid to forget. 

Once, she found an old drawing while cleaning out her room at her mother’s instruction. She didn’t remember drawing the picture. She must have been fixated with cows at an earlier point, and here was a field of horned, spotted blobs with stick-like legs, a red barn scribbled in heavy red crayon in the distance—but she held the paper with no memory of having held it before. A child’s mind is full of many things, sure. There wasn’t room for every little moment to be tucked away. But if that was forgotten, then what else might she lose?

She began writing. 

Each day before bed, a short or meandering recap of the moments she feared might go missing. She liked knowing that the bulldog she saw in the park today looked like soft velvet, and his eyes drooped like melted wax. She likes acknowledging the feeling of anxiety or fear when a conversation with a loved one feels a little…off. Maybe she omits what she had for breakfast every day, but if it made her feel something, she certainly would. 

Perhaps, it’s the feelings she’s writing. 

With every observation, every “Today I…” she does her best to capture the soul of the day. What did she do, who did she see, how did she feel and why? The why is always the toughest part. If she tries to figure it out, maybe she’ll have a beautiful, brilliant hindsight to look back on. Then she can chuckle and shake her head, the rush of the feelings now a thing of the past. She may not be in a position to be so smug had she not scribbled those words down in the first place. 

She likes to think so. 

If not, it’s merely a record for a future version of her—one with little memory of the days long gone, a warm nostalgia for pen marks she doesn’t remember creating. Or maybe it’s for a post-apocalyptic world where all media has been lost, and records of the time before are a salve for the destruction in which they live, an illumination of how they got there. She doubts, however, they would care that her pumpkin smoothie was a little spicy but otherwise delicious. 

Even still, it makes sense to write—even if what she’s writing makes no sense at all.