The Things We Keep
For years, I filled notebooks.
Tight, desperate script—
an attempt to turn emotional chaos
into something legible.
Pen to paper is good for the soul.
(No one tells you that once you start taking notes,
something in you already knows it’s over.)
I kept going long enough to fill dozens.
Tattered edges, vibrant covers:
strawberries, pears, lemons.
Cheerful outsides.
Tragic insides.
I tucked them safely in my bottom drawer
(the customary place for such things).
Maybe we all have something like that—
things we keep
just in case we need to remember.
Proof that it all happened.
That it mattered.
That I tried.
Then I started painting.
An attempt to turn hurt
into something transmutable.
Brush to canvas is good for the soul.
Two days ago, I burned them.
(The notebooks, not the paintings.)
I flipped through them first—
a quiet kind of tenderness.
Like meeting a younger version of myself.
I’d hug her now.
Take her for vegan ice cream.
Tell her about Payne’s gray, cad red,
and how petals can become light.
No longer hidden in a drawer,
the memories soften, dissolve, and metabolize
through paint.
Where there is grief, the petals insist,
there is also light.
The remembering, the mattering, the trying –
it lives in the work now.
Proof of healing,
aliveness,
and hope.
You can find my available work here.
Sending you peace, love, and painting,
Julie
