There it is. Fully intact. Purchased December 9th, 1984, the day before my fourteenth birthday, although I didn't start writing in it until January 1st, 1985. I wrote in it with some consistency for a year and a couple of months, and then it goes blank. As you open it, it reads (in Swedish:)
Please DON'T READ!!!
MARIKA'S secret DIARY
Whoever reads my diary without asking, should really think it through first. There are things written in here that no one knows about. Therefore I want my diary left alone.
If that's not an invitation/provocation to read someone's diary, I don't know what is. I'm basically saying that all my secrets are in here, so don't read it? No wonder my brother read it as soon as he found it, and it didn't take him long at all to use my musings to make fun of me, and attempt to extort me. There is actually an entry about three months in that talks about how I'm not going to write anything important (as if I had up until that point) because Ulrik had read the diary.
So, going through the diary, reading about my fifteenth year on earth was sad, humiliating, embarrassing and kind of torturous. A bit overwhelming actually. Flipping through the pages, I found myself in a strange, frightened anticipation, wondering what would come next, as I turned the pages.
Not as historically significant as Anne's, not as riveting as Belle's
The diary has a mixture of family news, school events, ski trips and other vacations, movies I saw, plots from the TV show Dallas, winners and losers in the Eurovision Song Contest, and brief gossip announcements about who is going out with who, in my circle of friends. There are a lot of lists of people, places and things. If I'd been to a party, I listed my entire outfit top to bottom, every single person in attendance, and boys in order of best to worst looking.
The sweet little resident of the laundry room
One diary entry ends with "my Mom wants to talk to Ulrik and I so I've gotta go." The next one starts "Last night, Mom told us that she is pregnant. Damn. We have to move." I go off on how awful this is for me, not just because of the move - which of course has a list of the friends I'm going to miss the most - but the humiliation I felt about having a sibling 15 years younger. I remember this so vividly. Ulrik and I telling our mother she was too old to have a kid. At 36. Oy.
We actually never moved, but instead turned the laundry room into a bedroom for little Martin who arrived July 23rd, 1985. It sounds awful, but it was a pretty spacious room and after it was redone and organized, the changing table had a faucet next to it, which I suppose was a convenient bonus.
Another entry has me go completely nuts after having seen Nicola Sirkis, (WHO?) the singer of the French band Indochine. I saw him on the street in Stockholm, was frozen stiff, and started crying the minute he had passed. Later that night, there's a pink bow tie in my list of what I wore to a party, so I must have gotten over whatever sadness I felt over seeing Nicola.
I'm overly chipper but also completely dramatic throughout the diary. Most of my existence was spent worrying and obsessing over boys, and crushes shifted almost every day. Yet, that day, it seemed as if I was going to die if I didn't end up with "the flavor of the day." I wrote things like "I love so-and-so, and my life will be ruined if we don't end up together."
Another strange thing is to see how completely concerned I was with what people thought of me. I must have been really afraid and insecure, as my Diary writing shows anxiety and worry when best friends spent time with other friends. I wondered if they talked about me, what they did, and if they were having more fun together then with me. That stuff is hard to read now. Really hard. I forget how difficult it was to be a teenager, and to go back and read my exact thoughts feels almost unbearable.
More like a cross between Bridget and the Wimpy kid....
But there are sweet things too. I write about picking up Ulrik's diploma from ski-school because he was sick, babysitting my brother Simon, and worrying about whether or not my uncle Bernie is ever going to meet someone and have kids. Of course, it was partially because I wanted cousins, but there was a part of me, it seems, that was concerned with his happiness. (He did eventually meet someone and had cousin Michael.) A friend from school tried to commit suicide and I brought my walkman to the hospital, so she could listen to music. I wrote about school trips to the museum and a flood in the kitchen, which provided me with a perfect excuse to be late for school.
Some of the funnier highlights include Stefan, who I had a crush on, perming his hair. I remember that perm so vividly. It was an awful perm, and might in fact have been what had my feelings for him cool a bit. We all had them, but when you're a dude and your hair is kind of short, it doesn't matter if it's the eighties, it's not attractive period. I also wrote about whether I should let this or that boy cut off my virginity bracelet, a piece of white string we all wore until we were "deflowered." I was also grounded but neglected to explain why.
Although I have an amazing memory, there were some great things in my diary that I had forgotten all about. I had an internship at a hair salon, I played a ton of badminton (!?!) and went to London for the first time where I shopped at Selfridges, danced at Hippodrome, and bonded with DJ, a cute Jewish Brit, over the Howard Jones album "Dream into Action." It seems as if 1985 was a busy year for me. London, Israel with my friend Syzanne, a new baby brother, and bad grades (probably on account of all the socializing I seemed to be doing.)
And then, towards the end of the year, after kissing this boy and that, it seems I had a boyfriend. His name was Malte and he had blonde longish hair, blue eyes and a big nose. One of those great ones that enhances a face, gives it character. He was a year younger, tall, kind, sweet and a good kisser. The diary doesn't say what happened to "us," which is just as well, as I have a vague recollection of kissing one of his friends at a party he was too sick to attend.
The diary doesn't run out of pages, instead it ends sort of quite abruptly. I wrote an entry on February 28th, 1986, which coincidentally was my brother Max's 8th birthday. And then, complete radio silence. Perhaps it's for the best as February 28th was a particularly good day for 15-year-old Marika. No worries, sadness or insecurities in this entry. No lists. Just a nice day skiing with some friends. Goofing around in the snow. A happy day in wintery Sweden.
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