When I was a kid I started writing a journal.

This journal was just for me and nobody else.

I exactly remember how it looked like: It had a beautiful, arty pattern, and I think there were also some teddy bears on it. The material was soft and I still remember vividly the flowery smell of the perfume-soaked pages.

I loved the familiar, comforting fragrance, that gave the diary a magical touch. Every time I took it out of my drawer, I would smell it.

To ensure that none of my curious siblings would be tempted to take a look at my secret notes, the book had a lock. And only I was the holder of the key.

I didn’t write every day.

But occasionally, I wrote a lot. Sometimes about random, unexciting  things form every day life.

I remember writing about a meeting with my uncle where he gave my brother a special device to treat his allergy.

One time, I think I was twelve, I wrote about how a boy I liked in school would give me his hand to pull me up a wall and that when he offered it to this popular girl, that also had a crush on him, she was too heavy (or he was too weak, however you may see it) and how happy I was about that.

Not nice, I know.

But that’s how I felt.

I didn’t think about how what I wrote sounded like or if it was interesting or not. It didn’t matter. The only purpose of my journal was the joy I would find in writing into my book. Nobody is ever going to read it except me.

When I didn’t write for a while, I would apologize to my journal about the gap and about my laziness and I would promise to not skip journaling for too long anymore.

Unsurprisingly, it would happen again. I think at some point I just accepted the fact that sometimes I felt more like writing and sometimes less. I accepted that and didn’t think about it much further.

This might be- apart from the fact, that this book had A LOT of (very thin) pages- a reason why this journal, which I had started when I was 8 years old if I remember it right, lasted until I was 17.

So it covered a very important period of my life.

I wrote about my first day in junior high and how I was the smallest in my class and classmates would comment on it.How embarrassed I was when my mom made me wear this traditional Austrian costume for the opening ceremony, while everyone else was wearing cool, normal clothes.

I wrote about buying my first bra.

I wrote about my first boyfriend. My first sex. How insecure I was and how beautiful he made me feel. How magical it was.

I never got to write on the last page of this book.

When I was seventeen, I took it with me on a summer vacation with my parents and my sister. We went to this place in the mountains, where we used to go every summer when we were kids.

When we arrived at the hotel and I unpacked, I couldn’t find the book anymore.

I looked for it everywhere.

I asked my family for help, but nobody, not even my mother, who would always find everything, could find it.

I was devastated and would have given every penny to get it back.

But it was gone for what turned out to be forever.

What remains is the bittersweet memory of the stories and feelings of my youth and the smell of flowery pages covered with ink.