Remember

We're getting close to the end of the school year now, so there's less and less to do in some of our classes. In one of my classes today, for instance, the teacher spent the entire period telling us about Found Magazine, which I'm totally addicted to now; I've been browsing through all the old Finds of the Day all afternoon. I find that kind of thing really fascinating, because you can't see the people who wrote the notes. But at the same time, you can. You can see inside a little portion of their brains. Which is something you don’t get from just looking at them. Or even talking to them, really.

I’ve gotten discouraged with myself many times over the course of this blog project—one of the many reasons why I haven’t been that faithful of an observer at times.
I’d love to think that I’m imagining people complexly when I write this blog. But the thing is, I can’t always know that I am.
Every time I wrote a blog about a person, even though I was trying to imagine them complexly, I ran the risk of being too judgmental and completely wrong about them, without even knowing it. And sometimes that really killed me.

That’s the main reason why I started copying notes I found on campus straight into the blog. With those notes, I didn’t have to imagine complexly, and didn’t have to take the risk of imagining wrong. I could just put them here exactly as they are, the way Found Magazine does.

I’m still trying to find the balance between observing and imagining, fact and fiction; and most importantly, keeping the judgments to a minimum. It’s tricky. And even though I’m leaving high school soon, I do intend to keep this blog up, so hopefully I can get better. (I know, I know. I don't have the best record of blogging when I say I will. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try.)

In the meantime, here’s one last observance from high school.

There’s a girl in one of my classes who’s really sweet; I’ve gotten to know her through a few different extracurriculars this past year. She moved to this high school her freshman year, from across the country, but she still visits her hometown and her church there during most school breaks.

When she came back from spring break, she had the word “Remember” written in blue ink on the inside of her left wrist, with a little heart drawn next to it. Every morning in first period, at some point, she looks at her wrist for a minutes, and remembers to remember.

When she notices that the ink is fading, she gets a pen out of her backpack and retraces the letters. She does this in class once every day or two, and she hasn’t let the word fade away completely yet, not for the weeks she's had it there. I don’t know yet what she wants to remember. Maybe one of these days I’ll stop just wondering, and open my mouth and ask her.

Whatever it is anyway, she really doesn’t want to forget it.