Here’s how it goes –
You save up money from your part-time job as a grocery store cashier so you can start to build your own website. You’ve got the domain and everything figured out, and you’ve even taken a course in beginner’s web design. There’s an entire decade’s worth of online journal entries saved to a long forgotten blogging site where you managed to gather a small, but responsive, audience of readers who also had years and years of entries saved up on that same website. There were two reasons you stopped posting to said website. Number one: every member of your audience had moved on to bigger and better sites, or they’d just lost interest in keeping track of you and their own blog, or maybe they’d just outgrown that part of their life. And number two: you had been diagnosed with a somewhat rare eye condition that would slowly cause a very important part of your vision to deteriorate. There is no treatment. There is no cure. Suddenly, your entire future is marked by one, massive interrobang (that’s the official name given to the non-standard punctuation mark that combines the question mark and the exclamation point into one character, invented in 1962 by advertising executive Martin K. Spekter, who decided that the use of two pieces of punctuation at the end of a sentence was just downright ugly). Overnight, you find that you are simultaneously screaming in terror about the future as a person with low vision and wondering what this would mean for you as a writer, an artist, and a young person who was exactly that: young enough to look as though you weren’t suffering from a form of eye tissue degeneration that generally only affects people over the age of 60.
A year after your diagnosis, you quit keeping an online record of your life. You’d found that you didn’t have anything good or nice to say about everything transpiring around you, and what was happening inside of you wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to look back on and remember anyway. One day, you’ll get into that mess. Today is not that day, and neither is tomorrow.
Cut to now. It’s four years down the road, and you miss your online journal. You miss it the same way you miss the way family Christmases used to be; You miss it the same way a school playground misses its children over summer vacation. Years and years without filling up your evenings with typed up daily rants and daily recollections had almost made you forget what this felt like. You’d been writing on a near daily basis for so long that coming back to it felt like you hadn’t taken a full breath since your previous journal heaved its death rattle of a closing entry. This is a revival.
You begin to look at your eye diagnosis as a minor setback instead of a death sentence for your passions.
I’ve been struggling with this first entry, unsure and afraid and filled with so many words that I hardly know which ones I want to let out first. I’ve been struggling because I don’t know who those words are even for, if they’re only mine or if people are going to want me to share with them, and if that’s the case, how do I avoid letting them down and succeed in letting them in all at once? This was originally meant for my poetry, and then it was meant for poetic prose and paragraphs that held word sequences that required deciphering. However, I think I’ve just decided that this is a place for all of the above and then some. I’ve built this little corner of my online world, slowly over the course of a year, so I could have a safe place to revive myself. I can finally breathe again. This is a place for me. This is a place where, should they stumble upon it, people can read the stories I can conjure up, whether they’re fictitious, poetic, or very much based in fact.
If you’ve made your way here, I’d like to introduce myself.
My name is Kasey. I’m 26 years old as of writing this entry, I was diagnosed with something called Stargardt disease in 2016, and I’ve been writing since I was eight years old. While that may seem like quite a long stretch of time to be writing records, stories, poems, etc., let the records show that I am only just getting started. This journey’s a long one, and I’m not stopping any time soon.
a collection of words 