Checkers and Chess

Today in church, we had a lesson from the stake YW presidency about keeping a record and how it's important to journal for ourselves and our posterity. Just now, I was reading The Catcher in the Rye and Holden finds out that his roommate is on a date with a girl he used to know. Holden gets really excited to find out that she's mentioned him and he starts telling this inconsiderate narcissist about this girl. He talks about her parents' divorce and how she was a ballet dancer who hated the heat because she thought it made her legs look fatter but practiced outside anyway because she loved to dance and how they would always play checkers and how she would just line up her kings in the back row, never using them again, because she liked how it looked. Holden then narrates that his roommate is shaving and doesn't seem to be listening to a word because, as Holden admits, "that kind of stuff doesn't interest most people."

I then thought of all the little things that probably only matter to me. I thought of Micaiah, who likes jalapeños on his pizza and rearranges the furniture in his room after a nightmare and enjoys playing chess and chasing his dog with a trombone.

I thought of Kristían, who loves linguistics as much as I do and snuck out of his house in the middle of the night with nothing more than a shaky plane to make it to Disney World and wants nothing more to be married in a church.

I remembered Maddie Love telling me she wasn't in love on a volleyball court far from home, and I remembered Taylor comparing the marching euphonium to the Gospel.

I saw Isaac compulsively sticking his hands into food and felt Ellie's extensive elephant collection and heard Abram singing "You Are My Sunshine."

I realized that I am already forgetting the things I love about the people I love and that I should be writing these things down. I need to copy down stories, conversations, encounters. I could be filling up notebooks, or even just posting them here or on SL. After all, if these are things others have no use for, who will help me remember them as the years go by? It's our own individual responsibility to keep track of our own stories, the things that matter to us and us alone.