The Grand Line

In a digital age where our posts have a character limit, where our stories only appear for a mere 24 hours, where do you turn to when your emotions endure for longer than a scroll on a feed?

Ask my mother and she’ll tell you that paper was my first love. I barely had toys growing up–we couldn’t really afford them–so I took pieces of paper from school transforming them by using the kid sized safety scissors I stole from my kindergarten class to make a makeshift book about a blue boat sailing across multiple pages. My mother and I would use grains of cooked white rice as glue, mushing them between our fingers, sticking triangle-shaped sails to the pages. I wore down the tips of my favorite cerulean crayon to draw waves that sprawled across multiple pages, taking the reader to a destination I, the author, never thought about. The last page of my first book was just a vast, empty blue sea, no boat in sight. Did the destination ever matter as much as the journey?

I’ve gotten older. Gone are the ship’s blindingly white sail made out of computer paper, replaced by cream-colored, gridded Tomoe River Paper. Instead of a cerulean crayon, I pour out my heart through the nib of my Lamy Safari fountain pen in the color Okuyama from the Shikiori Sailor fountain pen ink line. Gentle, blue waves are replaced by sprawling bloody, red script that documents the map of my late 20s: the highs of meeting other travelers, exchanging stories, and the lows of stormy, treacherous nights that reveal how brave, how persistent I am to truly understand the depths of the ocean. I turn back to older entries, noting the tears blotting words in my diary, trying to make out the markers that brought upon rainclouds. My fingers stained bloody from hours of writing down every breeze that feeds my sails towards its destination.

Fingerprints on a glass screen can no longer compete with putting pen to paper. When I write in my journal, it becomes a physical record of the journey of becoming who I am, rather than just thoughts to be fed into the digital abyss. I turn back to old journal entries, deciphering the hurried, almost illegible script of thoughts swirling in my head, the eye of the storm only dissipating the second I touch my pen nib to paper.

The practice of journaling--I remind myself--is solely for me. Honoring myself in this present day, present time. Honoring what it took to get me to where I am today, though, I’m still not quite sure about the destination. However, it does serve as a record of where I’ve been and the foundational blueprints of the person I aspire to be. So, while I post for others online, I write for myself. I bleed ink on pages to prove that I’m alive, to leave a physical mark in the world to signal: I’m still here.

Thank you for reading my first post! My name is Cher and you can find me online @overchering on Instagram, on overchering.substack.com, or wandering the streets of Philadelphia.