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August 17, 2025

Footnotes to My First Diary,
Sixth Grade, Lock and Key

Melissa Fite Johnson

  1. Purposefully broken lock. Too much trouble, and who would read. I trusted my mother.
  2. Later I blacked out each reference to a boy, pages and pages gone.
  3. Since this wasn’t for my mother’s benefit, it must’ve been for mine. Strike the evidence, make the memory go away.
  4. It doesn’t work this way. I remember those boys:
    1. Will, my first boyfriend. At his 11th birthday party, during Naked Gun 2 1/2, a movie his father had called each parent to get permission to show, the outline of Will touched the outline of me. His air and mine kissed, though we didn’t. When I’d arrived at the party, someone tossed me a balled-up note that he tried to intercept: “Go for it, Mel! Kiss Will!” No one had called me Mel before—a boy’s name, a name my mother hated. I loved this small rebellion and didn’t understand why.
    2. Charles, my friend’s brother. In my pjs, sleeping over, I watched him watch Ernest Scared Stupid. He sat across the living room, oblivious.
  5. My family in the background. 25 pages before the first mention of them, at a family dinner.
    1. My 23-year-old brother wouldn’t take his hat off in the restaurant.
    2. When my mother objected, my brother shouted. How important he was to the family.  How much everyone took him for granted.
    3. My father shook in his seat and jabbed his finger at my brother.
      1. “He couldn’t do much more because Dad has had two strokes and can’t talk” (26-27).
    4. My mother said how humiliated she was to be fighting in public.
    5. My brother said we could all go to hell.
      1. He threw “a lot of cuss words into the conversation” (28).
    6. My mother stormed out. My brother stormed out. My speechless father and I sat alone at the table, I didn’t specify for how long.
      1. “The scary thing is, they always fight like this” (28-29).
  6. 38 more pages. Only four more mentions of my family. Otherwise:
    1. Swimming and softball, the summer activities.
    2. Jurassic Park and Sleepless in Seattle, the summer movies.
    3. 12 more blacked-out devotionals.
  7. Every page in pencil, too tentative for pen.
  8. The handwriting someone else’s, the s like a 6, the lowercase t an umbrella handle.
  9. I want to cover my childhood right hand with my own, make her write what matters.
  10. This is what’s worth recording. This is what’s painful enough to delete.

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Diode, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS.