Dear friend,

Last Christmas you gave me a Moleskine journal to write in while I was traveling and exploring the great country of France. Though I appreciated the gesture and took the journal with me (along with the best of intentions) I did not actually write in it the entire time I was away. I wrote in a journal I kept for someone else. I wrote on my blog. I wrote on napkins and in notebooks and in half-filled composition notebooks, but I did not write in the Moleskine. The Moleskine was reserved for “real writing,” for the kind of writing that God made me to do and I was not prepared to do that sort of writing.

Then I was heartbroken and bleeding and hopeful with the kind of hope that fills your veins like a drug. The hope that says “No matter how much he ignores me or how deeply it hurts, I’m sure he has a good reason.” Hope that believes that love is strong, that it lasts, that it wins. And so I wrote all of these hopeful thoughts and all of my deeply pained doubts in a turquoise journal that I thought someday I might move past. I was hoping that someday would be the day that the man I still loved would call me on the phone and ask if maybe we could meet for coffee. Just to talk, the way you do when you’re getting to know someone all over again for the first time. But that day never came. I finished out the turquoise journal on the plane on my way from Minneapolis to Oakland, and in the final entry I gave myself permission, perhaps even a direct order to stop hoping for the relationship that has consumed the past year of my life.

Which leads me to today, the day that I will begin to write in the Moleskine. I am a little afraid. I am afraid of what I might say. I am afraid of what might pour out of my wounded heart if I am honest enough to give words to those feelings and fears. But I am also secretly a little bit excited. Because I think that telling the truth might bring me back to life and I think that maybe I am ready to tell the stories that I have been crafted to tell. Maybe.

I just thought that you might like to know. That I have reserved the Moleskine for the truth of this year and that I most earnestly hope it will serve all of us well.

With the best of intentions,

Amanda