P-s-s-t

I was there such a long time, hoping someone would take time to have a peek through the slits of the old antique trunk and rescue me from oblivion as the ink faded on my  pages and I became a little more illegible every day.

I remember clearly the day I was dropped there by a young man in a hurry. Gregory was his name. 

Way back then the attic was a fun place filled with children’s laughter and the sound of footsteps constantly on the attic’s iron staircase.  A child’s sticky hand would come and bang on the lid and rub jammy fingers along on my golden clasps. How I looked forward to the sound of the children’s shrieks and laughter. I thought it would always be like that.

All too soon those little children became men and women. It was then my presence in the corner of this increasingly dusty attic made sense. Gregory’s grand aunt, Lady Elizabeth, had been a passenger on that famous ship, ‘The Titanic’ and had written daily accounts of the ill-fated ship. At first there was such interest and excitement in my presence in the attic corner. Aunts, cousins and uncles, in-laws, even nosey neighbours came to stare at me and my reputed precious journal of the Titanic. But my clasps remained tightly closed. Why didn’t anyone want to open my clasps and read my precious journal?

 I feared it would  never happen. I would just end up being a pile of dog-eared, yellowish paper and one day I would be dumped in the paper bin.

When someone would trudge up those winding attic stairs  all I could hear through the slits were clicking sounds and the drone of disinterested voices, murmuring ‘take a picture for insta’ or ‘for your blog.’  Then the footsteps would fade once again into the distance. Another piece of my page  crumbles into dust. Another frosty night in the attic means another crumpled page, making it even more difficult to decipher.

I cried some metaphorical tears at the thought of my abandonment. Wouldn’t someone want to read my story, my real story of a very famous shipwreck. It seems real stories like mine don’t matter much any more. Why not I wonder? Apparently, it’s possible for a machine to write just as good a story as mine without ever having been anywhere near the famous shipwreck and people won’t be able to tell the difference. That new machine will simply scan documents and come up with what seems a version of the event as convincingly real as my real- life account. I’m bewildered. Don’t people want ‘real’ anymore and not ‘fake?’

Just as I was bemoaning my fate yet again, I heard solid footsteps on the iron stairs. My pages shuddered a little. Was this it? Were we finally going to meet our fate in the paper bin? I thought of Grand aunt, Lady Elizabeth, and her attention to detail during those days before the shipwreck, how she stuffed the journal beneath her blouse to save it from sea salt  as  she groped her way down the side of ship with all the other frightened passengers, hoping to be rescued.

The voice sounded like that of Gregory, but a more mature Gregory. His companion spoke of ‘primary sources’ and ‘archives’ and ‘research.’

The two men bent down and lifted up  the old antique trunk. Dust blew everywhere. It was like a snow storm in the pallid spring sunshine.

Precariously they carried the trunk down the spiral staircase.  They placed it cautiously on the dining room table.

‘It’s a precious cargo,’ Gregory muttered,

‘A once-in-a-lifetime discovery,’ his companion replied.

Having brushed the decades of dust off nooks and crannies of the trunk, they carried it to a car outside. My pages tossed and turned with every new move. I was fearful due to the  fragility of my precious pages.

‘I’ll deliver it to the University Archive immediately,’ Gregory said.

‘Herein may lie answers to some historical questions,’ his companion replied.

Lady Elizabeth’s heart would have danced with joy.