In Christopher Nolan’s Following, Cobb and his accomplice Bill burgle into people’s live just for shits and giggles, and while rummaging through the irrelevant contents of a small box in an apartment, Cobb tells Bill that the seemingly irrelevant things that people store in small boxes say a lot about the people who own them and that they are privileged to find them. He says “It is like writing a diary. You hide it coz you want someone to read it.” The dialogue immediately felt true and probably that was why I wrote a diary all along, and it was also why I abandoned it, coz I no longer want anyone to read my diary.

It is funny now for me to believe that I used to write a diary once upon a time, for I’m the most untruthful man that I have ever known. I’m even afraid of being honest to myself sometimes, so it feels farcical for me to write a diary. It took me a while for me to to admit my habitual dishonesty to myself, and probably it is in those days prior to that, I wrote the diary. I certainly wrote it for a reader, at least not just for me all the time.

I didn’t enjoy the writing, it was mostly witless, and occasionally painful chore I pushed myself to. The pages consisted of dry recollection of events of the day. When I’m in the mood for it, I exaggerated them out of proportion, or tried to find poetry out of the events where none existed. The writing, at best, was mediocre. The days when I skipped writing it, I felt like I was robbing myself off a pleasure, but on the days I managed to write it, I used to be disappointed.

My diary also tested the extent of my confessions, and my ability to look back about the actions that I regretted at the end of the day. It dared me to skip events in my day that I wanted to forget, made me accountable to certain things I rather wished to forget soon. It conflicted with my personality of an escapist and demanded a certain honesty from me, which was all becoming a bit too much for me to bear. I couldn’t keep on piling up lies in it and filling myself with an impassive regret. It couldn’t go long.

I don’t know who will be interested in reading it, but I thought of it as something that would be discovered sometime towards the late stages of my life, by someone other than me. I was not very emotional about it and used to be negligent about hiding it, and it promptly fell into others’ hands. It doesn’t bother me now, and it didn’t bother me when I first came to know that my diary was read, for it didn’t give a true picture of me. I won’t say that it wasn’t me, but what it said about me was incomplete, if not entirely irrelevant.

When I re-read it, I could point to a lot of stuff in it that was hyperbolic or just plain rhetoric. My diary never turned out to be who I am, and I take the entire blame for it, coz I’m never the person who should write a diary and abuse the beauty and the form of diary writing.

I stopped.