101

Apartment 101

In the apartment lives a middle-aged woman who loves to write. She has been a tenant at the building for as long as she and I can remember.

Sitting at her dining table, tightly squeezed into her small and cluttered kitchen, she described to me the benefits of keeping a neatly organized diary.

When she was a child, she used to have an old notebook with torn pages that she would often scribble in with her fluctuating but occasionally decent handwriting. She wrote about school, love, family, and dreams.

Ever since she grew up and traveled to college, she has lost her diary.

I think she’s still sad even until this day. Frankly, she put so much time and effort into that small book. She doesn’t deserve the pain associated with lost memory.

Today, an incredibly brilliant young man asked me what childhood is.

I couldn’t provide an adequate answer on the spot, but after some thought, I think childhood refers to the ages before realizing that life has so much more to offer than love. There’s pain in life, there’s suffering.

There are people who are barely able to put food on the tables and pay rent.
There are people working from sunrise to sunset, earning so little money that it is almost illegal.

I have just now realized,

Documenting childhood is so important because living with pain is inherently miserable, and childhood provides a bandaid to the wound, some sugar in that bitter and awful-tasting coffee called real life.

This realization may have come too late,

Or maybe not – we’ll see