In Lieu Of A Functioning Time Machine

can I suggest an afternoon poring over the gel-penned pages of your teenage diary?

On the 24th of March 2020, a day after my husband and I arrived in Sweden and one day into the first London lockdown, the bulk of our worldly possessions sat in neat piles on the floor of our old flat in Crystal Palace, with only our downstairs neighbour as guardian. If things had gone to plan, the moving company would have come for our stuff before we travelled, but of course nothing was going to plan for a lot of us in those early days of the pandemic. Among our summer clothes, dismantled bed frame, bank statements, crockery and nearly everything else that made up our home (we did bundle the PS4 into our checked baggage), sat a pink plastic archive box I bought in WHSmiths a long time ago. Inside it were my teenage diaries.

In the weeks before we moved, I’d had clearouts that would make Marie Kondo wince. I’d thrown away hardback notebooks full of songs I’d written as a teenager. I’d thrown away ridiculous home-made comic books held together with masking tape that had survived over two decades, only to fish them out of the bin bag at the top of the stairwell the following day. There was a desire to shed the past in a way I hadn’t for previous moves, as if doing so would manifest a different kind of future. The diaries held immunity to my unsentimental decluttering, though; they harboured versions of myself and my past that I knew I’d someday want to revisit.

It took two weeks for our things to make their way from London, through Denmark, over the bridge to Malmö, changing hands in Stockholm, and onto the motorway north. During that time I wore the same three outfits on repeat and replayed Uncharted 3 on a borrowed TV while sitting very uncomfortably on an inflatable bed. I didn’t give any thought to the pink plastic box or my teenage diaries inside it, and it wasn’t until this last month that I thought to return to the last of my adolescent records: the diary I wrote nearly twenty years ago, in 2004.

9th May ‘04 (Sunday)

This is my new journal!!! It’s my 5th one, can you believe it?! Oh well, I guess my life’s just soooo interesting it has to be written down…>So, here’s the low-down…

In 2004, I was 14 years old. Or, as my intro page to my fifth diary put it, ‘14 and ¾, so basically 15. Ahem.’ I was 14 years old and really liked the song The Reason by Hoobastank. Video streaming was just about a thing: the school didn’t know how to ban sites properly yet, so I’d spend ages watching t.A.T.u., Justin Timberlake and Evanescence videos on Yahoo! Launch before class. But at home, in this pre-Spotify yesteryear, if a girl wanted to hear The Reason by Hoobastank, she’d either have to wait until her allotted internet time and visit their website (which, by the way, was buffering the song intentionally so you’d buy the single and was the STINGIEST site ever!!), or spend an evening hopping between Xfm and Virgin radio in the hopes of catching it.

The diary I kept over the tumultuous months of 2004—a year which saw the breakdown of my parents’ marriage, Year 10 mock exams and a near-spiritual experience in my first ever viewing of Amelie—reads as though someone else wrote it. Someone who wanted to swim with dolphins, whose bucket list included the item ‘play a gr8 song as loud as I could possibly want’. I had a lot of opinions; mainly about Neighbours storylines, the vocal abilities of The Used’s lead singer, Bert McCracken, and the aforementioned stinginess of the Hoobastank website. I wrote lists upon lists of what I’d buy when I had money (‘more clothes to go with my look’) and which friends I owed phone calls. A burgeoning artiste (I can only hope that sarcasm carries in this medium), I was writing what can best be described as an epic piece of historical fiction about lovers separated by the Berlin Wall; huge segments of my diary are dedicated to in-depth plot outlines and character studies. When life was life-ing, 14-and-¾-year-old me saw writing my Berlin Wall saga as an escape from reality: ‘I am absorbed into another world - a world I have created, a world I control.’

These were the bricks of the home I had built for myself; a moveable structure of things and stories and dreams, insulation against a real-world home that didn’t always feel good or safe. It’s a coping mechanism I’ve held onto, though nowadays it functions with much more self-awareness and scant written annotation. In those first weeks in Sweden, while we slept in the guestroom on a bed left behind by the previous owners, I wore a wool jumper I’d syphoned from my mother’s wardrobe earlier that year, and clung to my beloved ‘This Is Fine’ dog plushie. It felt like these objects could protect me, somehow—from the ghostly hands I was sure would reach out from under the bed any moment; from the drifting feeling of being without permanent residency in post-Brexit Europe. But they also felt like the foundations of a new home; creature comforts cementing my place here, bricks hauled from one country to another.

Eventually, our belongings arrived. Many of them still sit in the boxes they were packed in, no permanent home having been assigned to them just yet. The pink plastic box sits in a built-in wardrobe in my writing room, alongside exposed plumbing, my yoga mat and a Van Gogh jigsaw puzzle. It will stay there until I find a place for it, or until I next lift the diary from its archive; dip back under the blanket of nostalgia, both comforting and a little suffocating, a piece of a home I moved away from wedged between the walls of the one I’m trying to build.

You can listen to an audio recording of this newsletter here.