Strangers in the night.

I'm supposed to be prepping for yet another class presentation on Wednesday, but for some weird reason or another I'm feeling strangely introspective today. I realise I have too many secrets, too many perceived inadequacies (shortcomings, flaws, embarrassments?) that I am fearful of divulging, let alone having them somehow leaked out to others; the ones that matter, and even the ones that don't. It occured to me why I even bother keeping a blog or journal, when all my most private (and subsequently most interesting) entries are kept as drafts for my own perusal. Perhaps it is the mere act of jotting them down that suffices as some muted form of release, that someone, consequential or not, knows.

I can't keep a regular journal or diary in its physical form; I'd be constantly paranoid as to someone accidentally -- or intentionally, for that matter -- coming across it, either when I'm not around, or however many years down the road when I've either moved and neglected to take my things with me, or passed on. Call it paranoia or excessive and needless worrying or whatever you will, but at this point of time I am adamant that I do not wish private details, tawdry or merely mildly mortifying, about myself revealed in the wake of my passing. To this date, I've consistently gotten rid of (or will, at least) everything that could possibly be "implicating" in its own way, and the few that have survived the exorcism (it is sort of one, if you think about it) are stashed away in places that I can only hope I alone am privy to.

It's not as if I've done something outright disturbing like murdering or raping (o_O) someone in my time, but that nagging feeling lingers still, and that having been said, I no longer think I can keep these thoughts in an online form, cathartic process or not; for fear of someone somehow chancing upon them, whether via my computer, or some other unanticipated mishap, or not. I never once considered that I would care so much, or even why I do (anyone who even remotely has secrets will know why), but I do, and it's just something that I'm going to have to live with. Sometimes I think I will burst if I don't at least tell someone -- anyone, but I don't want to leave a possible trail that might potentially come back and haunt me at some point in my life.

It might be part of why PostSecret intrigues me so much. There just might be a huge fuckload of postcards from this little pocket of the world someday, but even then I'd worry about the postmark. And handwriting. And fingerprints. You know, what if... and other obsessive things like that.

So after all that convoluted public mulling, today I say goodbye to my other online journal, the one to this date I'd assumed was for me and me alone. But it wasn't, and while I am sorry to see it go, I think I'd sleep better with it gone.

Thank you for 2002, it was a blast.

***

I took a trip on a train, and I thought about you
I passed a shadowy lane, and I thought about you
I peeked through the crack and looked at the track,
The one goin' back to you, and what did I do?
I thought about you.

"I Thought About You" - Frank Sinatra