The Company, Displaced
an excerpt

Snapshot: A Formica-topped table, strewn with finger-stained dissertation drafts, empty coffee cups, tortilla chip crumbs, a half-empty package of granola bars. At the center sits a black three-ring binder, ripping apart at its cheap plastic seams, with a sticker on its front reading “The Company, Displaced.” Stuffed willy-nilly inside this binder: a massive sheaf of properly lined, properly margined notebook paper on which paragraphs of prose have been written in barely legible blue ink. The handwriting is slender and loopy, cursive, difficult to interpret. There is a folding chair pulled up to the table, and at it I sit, pen in hand, still scribbling.

In the novel Dracula, Miss Mina Murray – one of my favorite heroines in literature, taking her place with Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, among others – sets for herself the impressive goal of setting down on paper everything that happens to her. Perhaps that’s what I should have done, last summer: transcribed all the events as they occurred, when they were still fresh in my mind and I could set down a thoroughly detailed account of every day. But I did not, and that I regret. No pictures, even, though I had a camera ready. It was my own foolishness, or my laziness, or a combination, that led me to throw away the memories that I could have taken with the flick of a flash button. I have a single picture from graduation, framed and fraying, on my dormitory nightstand. Hopefully, that will serve to jog my memory, for now I want to emulate Miss Mina in a belated fashion. With these journals (entitled “The Company, Displaced;” I have an obvious weakness for such archaic, poetical phrasing) I hope to capture the spirit, if not the perfect specifics, of that week after high school graduation. Consider this binder the diary that I should have kept. And because I have no photographs but the one, I will use my words to create more, in occasional snapshots like the one you see above. In that way this notebook will be both written record and photo album rolled into one. Don’t take everything I am about to write as exact and pure truth, but know that I have no intent to lie to you. Also know that I am not one for the wishy-washy in writing. You will see no “Her shirt was blue... or it might have been red” in this book. If I think her shirt was blue, I will call it blue. The details I cannot remember I will invent or omit, preferably more of the latter – though poetic license, I suppose, allows me to do the former as well. Being a writer has its perks. Another perk is the ability to use needlessly big words, a favorite habit of mine. Prepare yourself, dear reader, for a plague of unnecessary adjectives and an infestation of difficult verbs. Otherwise, these journals are simply journals. Do not expect great literature. Expect a transcript of something beautiful that happened once.
With that, friends and readers, I give you “The Company, Displaced." I can promise you nothing in the way of skill or interest level. I can promise you this: that I will enjoy writing these pages far more than you will enjoy reading them. It is an unfortunate aspect of memoirs, you know.