Missing Open Diary in New Beginnings

I feel like my first entry in this diary should be pay respects to my Open Diary. I feel like a friend is dying. Maybe I'm just being silly, but I can't help myself. My OD would have been 13 years old this July. It would have been a voice-cracking, pimple-popping, braces-wearing teenager, metaphorically speaking. So much of my life was written there: my beginnings in college, girls I had crushes on, finishing school, my mom's death, my dad's brain injury, starting my career, my unemployment struggles, my passing the CPA exam, the death of a dream, restarting my career.

Bearing all that in mind, I feel like I lost a friend, a close friend who knew almost everything about me. Over the years, I had OD friends who would followed me for a period of time. We'd read about each others' lives and provide commentary and support. So many of those friends fell away, opting to start new diaries elsewhere long before OD began showing signs of difficulty. I'd follow them for a little while on their new diaries, and they'd return the favor, but eventually we'd fall off each other's radar. I had one friend who had maybe three or four online journals. She'd write in one for a period of time before wanting to switch to another, then another. I never understood such flightiness. Why wouldn't you want to have everything in one journal? One giant, cohesive chronicle of your life.

That's what I wanted. I imagined being an old man one day, and being able to comb through my early writings, marveling at how much I'd grown and even being somewhat embarrassed at how much growing I had yet to do. So much for that. I suppose everything has its eventual, yet inevitable ending. Open Diary was always on borrowed time from the moment it began, just like me. OD's ending just happened to occur before my own.

Well, such is how life goes. I hope Prosebox is ultimately every bit the awesome community Open Diary was in its prime. Here's to missing the lost but not forgotten, and embracing the new and still to come.