I End Every Journal With a Letter to the Next One
Each finished notebook briefs its successor on who I'm becoming.
The last page of every notebook I own is addressed to someone who does not exist yet. Before I am allowed to buy a new journal, house rules, I have to sit down with the dying one and write a letter to its successor, and the letter always begins the same way: Dear Next One.
This started in 2016, as a joke. I had just finished a journal for the first time in my life. Understand that I had started perhaps thirty journals by then. Starting journals was my sport. Every January, every breakup, every new city: a fresh notebook, twelve earnest pages... then silence, then a drawer.
But that year, the year my grandmother died and my lease fell through and I ate an unwise amount of gas station food in a borrowed Civic, I somehow wrote all the way to the last page.
There was nowhere left to go.
It felt, and I know how this sounds, like abandoning someone.
So I wrote: Dear Next One. Here is what you are inheriting. She is off sugar again. It will not last. She cries in the car and calls it allergies. Do not let her buy expensive pens as a reward for sadness. She is better than she was in March. Be patient with her. There is a person in here worth the paper.
I signed it, closed the cover, and forgot about it until nine months later, when the next notebook ran out of pages and I realized, with the specific dread of a person who has accidentally founded a religion, that I owed a letter.
I have written fourteen of them now.
Every list of journaling rituals says the same things. Write in the morning. List three gratitudes. Keep the notebook by the bed like a glass of water. Mine is none of that. Mine happens four or five times a year, only when a notebook dies, and it works like shift change at a hospital. One nurse briefing the next at seven a.m. Here are the patients. Here is who had a rough night. Watch the man in room four, he lies about his pain.
The journal pages are the long shift. The letter is the handover.
And the letters know things the pages do not.
The pages are written from inside the day, at ground level, where everything is fog and errands and whoever was short with me at work. The letters are written at altitude. Once a year or so I sit cross-legged on my bed with all of them, pen in my teeth, and read only the last pages, in order, and it is like watching a person assemble herself in time-lapse. The entries are memory. The letters are trajectory.
October 2017, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary letter about a new job, I find this line: Something is ending and I am pretending it is the weather.
Two weeks after I wrote that, Marcus sat me down at our own kitchen table like I was a guest in it and ended us. Afterward I searched the two hundred pages of that notebook for a warning... and found nothing. Dinners. His mother's birthday. A fight about nothing that I recorded as being about nothing.
I had hidden it from my own diary. The letter caught it anyway.
A diary records who you were. The letter at the end is the only page that admits who you were trying to become.
Then, three years ago, I left journal number twelve on a train.
The 5:40 to New Haven. I had been visiting my father, who had just been handed a diagnosis with a name I still cannot say casually, and I wrote the whole ride the way you bail water out of a boat. Somewhere outside Bridgeport I hit the last page, so I did the ritual right there against the window. Dear Next One. She is tired in a new way. Be gentle, she is doing grief and commuting at the same time. She is going to call her father every Sunday now, hold her to it. I capped the pen at my stop, grabbed my coat, and left five of the hardest months of my life in the seat pocket next to a snack wrapper.
I called the lost and found every day for a week... Nothing.
I grieved that notebook in a way that embarrassed me. People lose whole houses, I told myself. You lost a spiral-bound object from a drugstore. But it was the only place that winter existed in words, and the letter, the handover, the one page that mattered, was gone with it. The next notebook sat on my desk for a month, unopened... because nobody had briefed it.
Three weeks later a padded envelope arrived with no return address and a Hartford postmark. My journal, water-stained at one corner, otherwise whole. Inside the back cover, on a green sticky note, in handwriting that slanted like rain:
"Found this on the 5:40. I'm sorry, I read only the last page. I hope you became her."
I stood in the lobby of my building and cried onto a stranger's sticky note.
Here is what that stranger could not have known. Of all the pages in that notebook, they read the only one that was ever written to be read. The entries were for me. The letter was for whoever came after me, and someone did come after me. She just happened to live in Hartford.
The ritual changed after that. I still write the letters, still begin them the same way, but now I write them knowing they might be the only page that survives, so they have to be true enough to stand on their own. And I finally understood what they actually are. Underneath the jokes about sugar and pens, every single one is a document of hope: proof that on my worst days I still believed there would be a next notebook, a next year, a next her.
Last spring I typed one of the letters out, names removed, and posted it on a community wall for poets, half expecting silence... Instead, strangers started leaving the last pages of their own notebooks in the replies. A woman in Manila said she had been ending her journals with lists of fears and was going to try ending with instructions instead. A man wrote a letter to his next self and apologized to him in advance, for things he had not done yet but knew about. It turns out I had not invented anything. I had just stumbled onto one of the doors everyone is already looking for.
My father is still here, by the way. Slower, but here. I call him on Sundays, because a woman on a train once told a stranger I would. He asked me last month what I keep writing in "those books," and I gave him the honest answer: complaints, mostly, and then one page of directions.
The notebook on my bed right now has about thirty pages left. I already know how the letter will start, because they all start the same way, and I already know some of the lines, because certain sentences have stopped being jokes and started being the liturgy. Dear Next One. She is off sugar again. It will not last. Be patient with her.
There is a person in here worth the paper.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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