“shallow focus photography of person in white and black striped top writing on white paper” by Lonely Planet on Unsplash

Imagine all the people

Kai Chan
Kai Chan
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

This is part of my experiment to write regularly and publish every day with the help of 365 Days of Writing Prompts. Today’s prompt: “The next time you’re in a public place — a coffeehouse, a park, a store — observe the people around you. Pick a person, a couple, or a group, and imagine what their lives might be like.”

It is a typical workday morning. I arrive at the bus stop, waiting for a bus to take me to work. Several people are already there. Some look at their phones. Some talk to each other. Some stare at the direction where the bus is supposed to come. A young lady writes calmly in her journal. Ah, it is Journal Girl again.

Of course, her name is not Journal Girl. Technically, I have not come up with that name either. It crossed my mind one day and has stuck there ever since. It was from Season 1 Episode 8 of 13 Reasons Why, in which (mild spoiler ahead) Ryan gave Hannah a journal. He hoped to persuade Hannah to write her thoughts in it. Depending on which version you believe, either his magazine needed more juicy content, or he knew that Hannah was a great writer whose talent would be wasted unless she wrote down her thoughts and published them. “Take it. Your thoughts deserve a decent place to live. Come on, I know you’re a journal girl.” Does Journal Girl have a real-world counterpart of Ryan? I do not know.

The journal is of the size of a standard paperback book. It looks pretty ordinary like the journals that bookstores sell. No, not the extra fancy ones with gold paint on its sides. Just an ordinary, useful journal. She just stands there, holds the journal open with one hand and write with the other hand. She makes it look so easy. Writing like that is hard, I know because I tried it before. My journal-holding hand got tired fast, and I probably dropped the journal about ten times before I gave up. Although I have not been able to figure out the words, the writing does not seem to be any kind of brainstorming. The handwriting is remarkably neat. No scribble. No editing marks. No crossed out words. It was like she has planned every word in her mind and simply take her time in writing them down.

Maybe she is indeed not just journaling. But first, since she gets off the bus at the terminus (just like I do), what does she do at the university? Since I have not interacted with her, I can only guess. She does not carry a lot of things with her. Sometimes, the journal is all she carries. From that, I conjecture that she is a graduate student who has an office on-campus where she keeps her stuff. Maybe she is a computer science student who does her research while she is not studying or teaching classes. Maybe she is a research assistant in the field of artificial intelligence. As soon as she gets into her lab, she is going to check on the dozens of computer nodes that are fine-tuning her image recognition algorithm, which she needs for the paper that she intends to submit in a few months. I am sure that she is very busy while juggling all of these duties.

But somehow, she manages to find time to write. No, she does not have a whole lot of time to write, but she always manages to squeeze in some writing here and there. At lunchtime, she just grabs a bite from the coffee shop next to her lab, find a space, and have lunch while she writes a couple hundred words. And as I know, while she is traveling to and from the university, she writes too. Writing is her way of getting away from all the computer stuff and clear her mind. Therefore, it only makes sense that she writes on a good old paper journal. She wishes she could write with a fountain pen to go with the journal, but she gave up after the one that she had leaked ink pretty badly. Nevertheless, equipped with a journal and a ball pen, she is ready to write anywhere she goes. After all, ideas can pop up at any time, right?

What does she write? She keeps working on one fictional story after another. She likes to imagine that she has escaped to the countryside, where the scenery is beautiful and everything is much simpler. That is the setting of many of her stories. In fact, her stories are pretty good, although she does not know that yet. She has thought about publishing them, someday. For now, the stories live in her journal and her journal alone. But who knows? Maybe down the road, she would indeed get to publishing them. In fact, they might be among the next stories that I am going to read somewhere?

Changing the world that talks too much, one piece of writing at a time. Leading the leaders, when they can lead and when they cannot.

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