By the Book
As I stared down at the pages in front of me, I couldn’t decide whether I was dreaming or just crazy.
That morning, after settling into my new dorm room in Copenhagen and entertaining the usual pleasantries with my new flatmates, I decided to wander around and explore the city. I took my dad’s old camera, which he had given to me for my fifteenth birthday. Its buttons and dials had scuffed with use over the years, but that was more my doing than his. My search off the main streets for abandoned, overgrown buildings led me past a small stationery store.
The prospect of going abroad for my junior semester had filled me with tremendous anxiety—the idea that maybe I would waste the opportunity, or not fully appreciate how lucky I was to have the chance to travel. I felt like I had dug myself into something of a rut back home, as though I had squandered the chance to flourish in the shade of my looming, embarrassing past. In an entirely foreign environment, thousands of miles away from any remnant of who I used to be, I felt free to reinvent an image according to my own design—one not precipitated by the expectations of those who had known me earlier. Recording each day in a journal seemed like the perfect way to reflect on my experiences—to get the most out of the semester.
The dimly lit interior of the stationary store was illuminated almost entirely by the beams of sunlight that poked through the windows, catching the swirling particles of dust that, once settled on the rows of books, were kicked up by my opening of the front door. I decided on a journal tucked between two others on the stack, so that its covers were protected from the musty air. I flipped through its pages, looking forward to filling out its lines with memories yet to be had.
For the rest of the day, for each thing that I did—where I wandered to take pictures, where I stopped for lunch, the conversations that I had with my flatmates—I considered how I would transcribe it into my new journal, and what I could have learned from it. I looked forward to that moment at the end of the day when I would be able to sit at my desk and reflect. The prospect seemed meditative.
I was therefore shocked to discover, then, when I finally did sit down to write, that today’s entry was already written.
In my handwriting: I could notice the way the words slowly slanted down as they reached the right side of the page, as they always do; the way the text was vaguely smudged from writing with my left hand, as it always is.
In my phrasing: the same words I had been rehearsing in my head to describe events that had transpired.
In my thoughts: the same ideas and insights that I was prepared to offer the pages of my new journal.
At least, I had thought it was new.
I glanced down to inspect my left hand to confirm that it was indeed free from the annoying ink stains that writing with pen invariably accrues, discounting the possibility that I had somehow written the entry and promptly forgotten.
My confusion was redoubled upon turning the page to discover that tomorrow’s entry had also already been written. My voice, describing events that had yet to transpire. Flipping through the journal, every single page was filled with writing, all the way until the end, where, under the date that the program was supposed to end, I apparently described leaving Copenhagen, and how great of a semester I had had.
I had verified that the pages were blank when I had bought the book, so entries would have had to have been written some time during the day, but the journal was stowed away inside my messenger bag, which I had strung over my shoulder the whole time. There were the additional issues to consider, like how there couldn’t possibly have been enough time for someone to write the entries even if they did have it the entire day, nor did anyone on the program know me well enough to so perfectly emulate my voice and handwriting.
I considered running to ask one of my flatmates for their input, but I glanced at the clock, and they were probably all asleep by now.
With nothing else to do, I began reading.
~/~/~
The classroom was relatively quiet as I walked in, the usual buzz of conversation absent due to present unfamiliarity. A few groups of people were clustered and talking in hushed whispers—probably friends from home who had coordinated taking the same class, I guessed.
The journal said that I sat next to a guy named Taylor on the first day, and though I didn’t have a face to put to the name, I had a good guess who it was upon walking in. His wavy brown hair and freckles drew my attention, and my heart fluttered when he looked at me as I took the desk to his right. The window was framed behind him, casting his silhouette in a halo of golden morning rays.
I was grateful that the seat was still available, considering I was arriving later than I would have liked to—I had spent so long reading the journal last night that I slept through my alarm this morning.
“Hey,” I croaked, wondering if my knowing how this conversation was going to go would affect the outcome. I tried to act natural, but the journal’s narrative lurked in the back of my mind, a constant hand on my shoulder steering me along. “I’m Emerson.”
“Taylor,” he introduced himself. “What’s your major?”
“Psychology,” I said. “I thought this class in humanities would be a nice break.”
“I took a psych class last year for fun,” he said. “It was really cool, seeing what makes people tick.”
He flashed me a smirk.
Cheesy, I thought. I tried to restrain my smile.
“You majoring in English, then?” I asked, knowing full well that he wasn’t.
“Minor,” he said. “Computer science major.”
I was able to mentally check off the little details outlined in the journal, confirming the veracity of its contents. It seemed that what I had on my hands was genuine. I tried to push my excitement of that fact out of my mind and focus on the current discussion.
“That’s cool,” I finally said. “Game development, or…?”
He shrugged. “I’m interested in machine learning, but we’ll see where the future takes me.”
Ordinary nervous jitters aside, it was difficult to feign ignorance in the interaction while knowing how it would all end: that, by the end of the semester, we would be dating.
Thankfully, our professor took that moment to start class, and I was temporarily spared.
~/~/~
I was never the religious type, and my parents thankfully weren’t either, but I struggled to come up with any other explanation as to where the entries had come from. The how and the why of it eluded me, and I doubted that anything would come from showing the journal to anyone else except perhaps compromising its promised future, so I kept it to myself.
Having a guide to follow proved to be exceptionally useful the first few days of the program. I experimentally deviated from the events laid out in its pages one day by testing an ultimately inconsequential detail: where I ate lunch. It was curious to see that despite my transgression, the entries remained the same. The ink was dry, so to speak.
It meant that the journal would not offer a projected future for whatever actions I took, but rather a single path that I could choose to follow. Having read through it in its entirety, I decided that it was a future that I could be happy with. So, I went through the motions, like an actor following a script.
At first, it was relieving to have the veil of the unknown stripped away, but there was also something liberating about the endless possibilities that had laid before me when I first arrived. It made the happiness gleaned from my following the journal ring hollow, somehow—as though it weren’t truly earned. I comforted myself with the knowledge that it was the path that I would have taken in the journal’s absence, so in that sense, it did belong to me, but that did little to quell my uneasiness in obeying its contents.
By way of compensation, I had initially seized opportunities for genuine agency by correcting what would have been mistakes. The journal told me what friends were worth keeping, and which weren’t, for example, and I was able to spare myself the effort of trying to maintain them. However, I noticed that such aberrations propagated down the line into bigger changes, the journal often outlining events and parties that I now had no reason to attend. Thankfully, the semester promised in its pages seemed to remain attainable overall. For fear of ruining my chances even further, I clung to the path. The lack of guidance was now too terrifying a concept.
At least it told me the best places to take pictures.
~/~/~
“I feel like I should invest in one of those sun lamps,” Julia was saying. “The constant gloomy weather is kind of getting to me.”
“I know!” Taylor said. “I went to Florence last weekend hoping to finally get a break, and it was miserable there too.”
I hurried to catch up to them as they strode on ahead down the sidewalk. “At least it isn’t raining,” I added as I joined Taylor’s side.
“That’s true,” Julia said, eyeing the sky, which was blanketed by a thick layer of gray clouds as usual. “Would you guys want to finally go to Dyrehaven?”
I furrowed my brow. I couldn’t remember what we were supposed to do this afternoon.
“Ooh!” Amanda squealed beside Julia. “I’d love to see some deer.”
“Er, wait,” I stammered. I rummaged through my satchel for the journal.
Taylor glanced over his shoulder at me as I slowed my pace. “You good?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said absently. I found the book and began leafing through to today’s date.
“You’re always looking at that thing,” Julia commented. “What do you have in there?”
I found the entry. I had forgotten: we were supposed to go to Tivoli. Taylor and I were going to have a cute moment before going on one of the rollercoasters. “Uh, what?” I said, distracted. “It’s nothing.”
“I’ve been thinking about getting into journaling,” Amanda said. “Can I take a peek?”
“No,” I said, probably too quickly. “No, it’s private.”
The group had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. They were surrounding me in a small semicircle. I saw a pedestrian coming from behind them and wanted to warn them, desperate for the distraction, but my voice caught in my throat.
“You do constantly carry that around,” Taylor said. “Constantly.”
“I want to be ready to jot my ideas down.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you write in there, though,” he said. “And yet all the pages are full. That’s not really your journal, is it?”
“It is,” I said earnestly. It was mine, even if I didn’t write it. Right?
“It’s kind of distracting when you keep pulling it out, though,” Julia said. “We’ll just be eating in a restaurant, and you’ll be sitting in the corner with your nose in that book.”
Taylor nodded. “Live in the moment. Are you doing alright?”
“I’m fine. I—” I checked my watch. “We should hurry before they close.” I tried to push past them, hoping they’d follow.
“The Deer Park doesn’t close,” Taylor said slowly.
“Not the Deer Park. We have to go to Tivoli.”
“No one mentioned Tivoli, dude. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“And what do you mean we ‘have to’ go there?” Amanda asked.
I turned around. None of them had been following me.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
“This is my planner,” I lied, holding up the journal. “Today was the day I wanted to go to Tivoli. It messes things up if we don’t.”
“I kind of wanted to go to Dyrehaven,” Julia said.
“Taylor?” I pleaded.
He shifted, uncomfortable. “Me too,” he finally said.
I took a shaky breath. It was okay, maybe the day was salvageable. “Alright,” I said, and it came off a little harder than intended.
We walked in relative silence the rest of the way. Though Amanda had her excited moments of spotting deer, and the sun even poked through the clouds at one point, the mood of the group remained dour. I kept sneaking glances at Taylor, unsure how to initiate conversation, and he made no effort himself. If anything, he seemed to be avoiding me, opting to stand on the opposite side of the group as me.
~/~/~
With my ceiling light off, my desk lamp cast dramatic shadows on the photographs I had hung on the walls. Most were ones that I had taken with my camera at locations specified in the journal; others were of me and my friends from back home. As I stared down at my phone, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been keeping in touch with them very well.
I was just always so goddamn tired.
I threw back the rest of the drink I had fixed myself and buried my head in my hands. According to the journal, Taylor was going to invite me out to a bar, from where we would wander to a club, and then, finally, he would invite me back over to his place.
The only problem was that I never got the invite.
I had been sitting by my phone waiting for his text. After some time of waiting, since the journal never specified at what point he would text me, I began just drinking alone in the hopes that I would be ready by the time we finally did meet up.
My phone buzzed, and I shot my head up, but it was just an email notification. In the time my screen was lit, I saw the time: 23:41. I switched to the 24-hour clock on the plane over to Copenhagen to better integrate myself into the European lifestyle. What a pathetic gesture that was, I thought bitterly.
I had been looking forward to tonight for months, ever since that night I had first sat down to read the journal. And now I had messed it all up.
I stood up and paced around my room, as I had been doing since dinner. My other friends in my apartment had already left for some other bar, but I opted to stay behind, counting on Taylor’s forecast message.
My eyes caught on one of the photos I had taken on the wall. It was of a crumbling carving on the edifice of an old administrative building on the outskirts of town. The woman depicted had her hands outstretched, robe billowing with her movement, but time had eroded the stonework, grinding the details into obscurity. Her eyes were blank, her leading hand fallen off entirely, wrist worn to a nub. It was one of the first locations the journal had guided me to, but the entry didn’t say the exact location. I remembered having to wander through some seedy neighborhoods for hours before finally finding the damn thing. I had snapped the picture and quickly retreated home, cold and wet.
My eyes roved over the other photos I had taken—dilapidated buildings, overgrown cobblestone streets, rusted fountains—all instructed by the journal.
I unclenched the fists I didn’t realize I had been holding strong enough to leave little crescent shapes on my palm.
I had made it this far—maybe there was still hope. After another shot of gin, I grabbed my coat and headed out the door. They were probably already at the club by now, so I headed straight there.
As it turns out, I was correct. After fumbling through showing my ID to the bouncer at the door, I peered over the heads of people and spied Taylor. I quickly pushed to meet him, accidentally stumbling through the crowd forcefully enough to bump into him—not the smooth opening I was aiming for.
I noticed that Julia and Amanda were there with him. They had been invited.
“Hi,” I yelled, trying to make my voice heard over the thumping music. The pulsing colored lights made my already buzzing head spin.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey, Emerson.”
“How did you find us here?” Amanda said.
“Pure luck,” I said. I forced a smile.
“Did you come here alone?” Taylor asked.
“Yep.” I didn’t have it in me to make up a story.
Taylor leaned over to say something to Julia. I couldn’t hear the words, and my vision was spinning too much to try to read their lips.
Suddenly noticing that I had been swaying, I took a moment to steady myself. I looked up at Taylor’s face, admiring the way his freckles caught in the ultraviolet light. He stared back with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Whatcha’ guys been up to?” I asked.
“Oh, not much,” Taylor said. “I think we’re going to head home soon.”
I glanced down at the drinks they held, which were still relatively full. Amanda and Julia, meanwhile, were nodding.
I waited, hoping for the invitation back with him, but it never came. The silence dragged on, filled instead only by the thumping music and chorus of debauchery around us.
“Can I come?” I finally tried.
“What,” Julia asked, “home with us?”
I slurred, “No, no, with him.”
He shot her a look.
“Here, I can help you get home,” Amanda said. “I live super close, it’s no biggie.”
I shook my head to clear my mind, and the room spun. “Shit, I’m screwing this up.”
Taylor raised an eyebrow.
“C’mon,” Amanda said, dragging me away by the sleeve.
“Wait,” I whined. I looked back at Taylor and Julia, but they had already disappeared into the crowd.
~/~/~
Those three were supposed to be my best friends, but they never did reach out to me again. It got awfully lonely without them, which got me wondering how many friends I was supposed to make who simply didn’t merit a mention in the journal. People in my classes had already drifted together into their own groups, leaving me on an island of isolation.
Meanwhile, day by day, the journal taunted me with entries of how much fun I was supposed to be having, the fun sights I was supposed to be seeing, all concurrent with my own misery. The version of me in the entries was glowing about how happy I was that I came out of my shell by the end—that I was able to get my first real boyfriend, even. But I felt as alone as ever.
I crouched down in the center of the main floor of one of the abandoned factories I had found in my time exploring for photography. Shattered planks of wood and rusted metal were scattered around me, but I had brushed aside the dust and debris to clear an area in the middle. Just enough light streamed in through the broken windows to illuminate the space, but I added my own with the lighter in my hand. I touched the flame to the pages of the journal, slowly brushing it side to side to let it catch. Eventually, the embers glowed, and the book was slowly consumed by the flame, papers curling inward as they blackened.
I began to trudge away, broken glass crunching under my boots, when I suddenly had an idea. I found a perch on a pile of wrecked machinery and pulled my camera out of my bag. I leveled the sight at my eye, and snapped a picture, the shutter clicking as it closed over the view of that pale fire flickering against the dark.