How Could You Not Read My Diary?

I forgot my diary in the living room. It sat on the table beside the sofa for a week, waiting to spill my deepest secrets to anyone who opened it.

I was horrified when I found it there — had anyone read it? Had I written anything mean about my husband, daughter, son, or parents? I couldn’t remember. I flipped through the pages and took stock of my inner life: the Christmas list, the wifi password, a recipe for pesto, an over-ambitious exercise plan, a couple of rants about work, a surreal dream, and an embarrassing musing about how I’d like to take Charlotte Bronte on a friend date to the Natural History Museum.

Relieved, I shut the book. I even laughed a little — the kids probably thumbed through it and realized there was nothing juicy. At that point, my daughter came into the living room, searching for her phone.

“It’s okay,” I said, holding up my diary. “I’m not mad.”

“What?” she asked, looking under the couch cushion.

“I said I’m not mad that you read my diary. I don’t care if you know those things about me.”

“Why would I read your diary?” She looked at me as if I’d suggested she read an old software manual from 2004.

I asked my son about it that evening after he came home from practice.

“Did you read my diary? I don’t care if you did. But…did you?”

“What diary?”

I pointed to the book on the table.

“Nah, I don’t like books,” he said.

My kids are so strange, I thought. If I’d found a diary in the living room, I’d barely be able to resist the temptation to read it. In fact, I’d probably take it to its owner immediately so that I wouldn’t be tempted. I was surprised my husband hadn’t brought it to me, along with a confession that he’d peeked at its pages.

That night when I went to bed, I handed the diary to him. “Did you see that I accidentally left this in the living room? I’m so embarrassed,” I lied.

“What is it?” he asked.

“My diary.”

“Hmmmm…” he said, returning to his computer.

“Did you read it? It’s okay if you did, I have no secrets from you,” I said.

“No,” he said, his gaze fixed on the screen.

“Well…don’t you want to read it?”

He looked up from his computer again. “Do you want me to read it?”

“No,” I said, frowning. “I want you to want to read it.”

“How long is it?” he asked.

“Never mind.” I clenched my jaw and shoved the diary under my side of the bed. “It’s full of murder plots and sexual fantasies about rich businessmen.”

I lay in bed with insecurities running rampant through my head. Am I really so boring and predictable now? No one wonders if I have a secret life that I share only with my diary?

Or do they all just hate my writing?

At that moment, I vowed that I would write several diaries full of sex, lies, and murder, and plant them all over the city. I’d leave them at the laundromat, the hair salon, the library, the coffee shop, and even one in the break room at work (anonymously, of course), so that everyone could read them and wonder who had written such things.

Then I had an even better idea — I would write a “special” diary, to leave open on our living room coffee table. I’d tell about how I’d discovered that our house is haunted because it used to be a mortuary run by cannibals, but no one in the family can know, because once they know and talk about it, vengeful corpses will explode out of bedroom closets in the middle of the night. Thus I drifted off to sleep, plotting my revenge.

The next morning I awoke and realized what a colossal waste of time it would be to write several book-length diaries that would undoubtedly get tossed in the trash by a barista at some point. (And it was a tiny bit immature to terrorize my family with stories of hauntings.) It would be a much better idea to write stories about sex, lies, murder, and hauntings and publish them on the internet.

And maybe I could work on having a more interesting life too — one that’s worth writing and reading about. That’s my goal for this year and next. I want my future diary to be a siren’s song, tempting people to dive in and read the reflections of a woman who lives out her dreams. I won’t mind at all.