Lost Diary

A few weeks ago I bought this abandoned diary at a junk store. The entries span from 1999 to 2000 and were written by a 12-year-old girl named Samantha. She signs her entries as "Sam" or, sometimes, "Sammy". It's a little diary, a hardbound and satin-covered volume from Chinatown, and most of its pages are full. Sometimes Sam addresses her entries to "Mari", a made-up friend created on the Barbie website. There's a printout of what Mari looks like pasted onto the inside front cover of the diary. Mari is wearing blue jeans, a red hoodie sweatshirt, and had a big red beehive hairdo.

I've only read half of the diary so far. It's not particularly exceptional--normal 12-year-old girl stuff, quarrels with friends and passing but entirely innocent mentions of boys. Sam writes most passionately about riding horses.

So far there's no hint of what happened to the girl who wrote it. She must be 16 now, maybe 17. The diary's content is pretty bland, yes, but perhaps Sam ran across it and, in all of her teenaged wisdom, didn't want anything to do with the girl she was when she wrote it. Maybe it got tossed out against her will. Maybe she's not sentimental. In any case, I feel torn about the mundane reality of the Sam it reveals to me. The voyeuristic part of me wants to read scandalous drama, but the decent, moralistic part of me is pleased to see the stability and calmness of her life.

Me, though, I'd never throw away a diary. I guess that's why I bought this one.