What Lies Within

The Unread Diary

Grief turns you into an archivist. Not out of love for history, but out of hunger for a different ending. You start to believe if you find the right object—the key, the letter, the photograph—you can change the thing that already happened. Or at least understand it enough that it stops gnawing at your bones.

I went to my mother’s room like a thief.

Her bed was made in that old military way, corners so sharp you could cut your hand, which she had made me redo a thousand times as a girl. The air was colder there, the curtains tied back with symmetrical knots. I opened the wardrobe and smelled camphor and her perfume: a thin, stubborn lilac that felt more like a rule than a scent.

Top drawer of the vanity: hairpins in a line. Second: powder compact, comb, a lipstick worn to a strange, almost accusatory stump. Third: handkerchiefs, pressed and edged with lace, every one white as if no one in this house ever bled.

Under the handkerchiefs, flat as a secret: a small leather diary with a tiny brass clasp.

I sat on the edge of her bed and held it in both hands. It was warm from the drawer. Thumb-marks darkened the edges as if she had picked it up and put it down and picked it up again instead of writing inside, as if handling it counted as confession.

The lock was no bigger than a lentil. It didn’t respond to any of the iron keys, which felt like a joke the house was making at my expense. I pressed my fingernail into the seam, considered a knife, considered fire, considered prayer.

“Please,” I said out loud, not sure who I was addressing.

Nothing. The clasp stayed shut.

I brought the diary down to the dining room where I could breathe. I set it on the table where my mother had made me practice letters, her hand over mine to keep the loops small and tight. I laid the blue ribbon beside it. I laid the drawing of the stick figures above it like a blessing.

The lock gleamed a little in the late light.

“Fine,” I said. “Later.”

I meant it. I did. But I still found myself pressing my palm over the clasp absentmindedly as I paced, my cut from the splinter pulling a little. When I lifted my hand, a smudge of my blood—small, hardly anything—marked the leather.

The diary drank it so quickly I thought I’d imagined it.

I froze, heart leaping up like a trapped bird.

“Absolutely not,” I said to the empty room, which is the kind of thing you say when you know exactly what you’re going to do next.

I pressed my palm lightly to the clasp again. Warmth traveled up through my skin like a rumor. Something clicked. A small interior surrender.

The lock came loose.

I opened the diary and immediately wished I hadn’t, not because of what I found, but because of the handwriting.

It was like mine.

Not perfectly. My mother’s letters were more disciplined, the loops more strangled, but the slope, the nervous length of the descenders, the way the t’s cut a little late—it was too close. I read anyway because I couldn’t not.

She hums in the mirrors. When I smile, I feel her mouth use mine.

Next page:

The boy’s eyes are too bright. He is a window. I close the curtains. She opens them again.

And then a line that felt like a nail through the palm:

There is a girl in the glass and she is not me. She is not me.

I shut the diary and sat there a long time, watching the chandelier’s prisms turn the gray light into dull rainbows. When I opened it again, the ink smelled faintly metallic, like old coins.

Halfway through, a smaller note had been tucked in—ripped from another book. If you are reading this, Anna, you’re already inside the story. I kept you out as long as I could.

I folded that paper back on itself with careful anger and slid it between the pages where I’d found it. I wanted to throw the whole thing into the hearth. I wanted to sleep with it under my pillow. I did neither. I carried it back upstairs and put it on my dresser, facing the mirror like an opponent.

That night I dreamed I lifted it and the pages kept turning long after I let go, as if wind moved only in that room. The handwriting leaned harder, closer to mine with each page, until finally the letters were my letters, the lines my lines, and the last words were mine too: I am not me.

I woke with the taste of iron in my mouth and the diary open to the center. I hadn’t touched it.