The Five-Year Journal

TITLE: THE FIVE-YEAR JOURNAL

A STRANGER'S STORY

WRITTEN BY: LEGANCY WORDS

The leather was soft, worn smooth at the corners from two years of use. Leo ran his thumb over the gold-embossed title on the cover: Five-Year Memory Keeper. He’d found it tucked away in a thrift store, between a outdated cookbook and a romance novel with a cracked spine. He was a sucker for abandoned things, for stories left behind.

The concept was simple. Each page was dedicated to a single date, but underneath were five questions, repeated year after year. What made you smile today? What’s weighing on your mind? One thing you learned. The magic was in seeing how your answers evolved.

But this journal’s story had already begun. The first two years were filled with a neat, looping cursive. The previous owner’s name was inscribed on the inside flap: Elara.

That night, with a cup of tea steaming beside him, Leo began to read. He didn’t mean to pry; he just wanted to see what kind of person kept such a journal.

October 3rd: Smile:

The way Finn’s ears perk up when he hears the word “walk.” Mind: Mom’s doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Anxious. Learned: You can propagate spider plants from cuttings. Tried it!

Leo learned that Elara had a dog, a mother with health concerns, and a love for plants. Her life unfolded in these tiny, intimate postage stamps of text. He learned her favorite coffee order (oat milk latte), the name of her best friend (Sarah), and that she hated the sound of loud chewing.

Without realizing it, Leo started looking for her. He found the café she mentioned—The Grumpy Bean—and ordered an oat milk latte. It was good. He started taking walks in the park she frequented, half-hoping to see a woman with a dog named Finn. His own life began to feel dull in comparison to the richly documented simplicity of Elara’s.

He began to answer the prompts himself, his own blunt script filling the lines for Year Three, right below her entries for Year One and Two. It felt less like writing and more like continuing a conversation.

October 3rd (Elara’s Year 2 entry): Smile:

Mom’s results came back clear. Huge relief. October 3rd (Leo’s Year 3 entry): Smile: The leaves in the park are finally turning. Thought of you.

His friends noticed. “You’re obsessed with that dead woman’s diary,” his roommate said, only half-joking. Leo shrugged it off. It wasn’t obsession; it was curiosity. It was connection.

For the first several months, Elara’s world was warm. Her worries were ordinary: work deadlines, forgetting to water her plants, hoping for rain for her garden. Her joys were small and specific: a perfect avocado, a song on the radio that reminded her of college, Finn learning a new trick.

But as Leo read into the second year, a shadow crept in. The entries grew shorter, the ink sometimes blurred as if by a water droplet.

March 15th: Smile: — Mind:

The quiet. The heavy quiet. Learned: It’s possible to feel lonely in a crowded room.

Leo’s chest tightened with a protective ache. He turned the pages faster, his own heart sinking as Elara’s did. He felt like a time traveler, powerless to stop what was already happening.

Then, in mid-July, a shift. A flicker of light.

July 18th: Smile:

Went for a long drive. Listened to loud music. Felt… something. Mind: Thinking about tomorrow. Learned: The sky looks endless from the cliffs at Seabreeze Point.

Leo felt a surge of relief. She was coming back! She was finding her way out of the fog. He eagerly turned the page to July 19th, ready to see her recovery continue.

The entry for July 19th was not in Elara’s familiar, careful script.

It was a harsh, slashing handwriting, written with a different pen. It only answered the first question.

What made you smile today?

The answer was a brutal, single line:

“Finally getting this place cleared out. Found this. Weird.”

The air left Leo’s lungs. The words didn’t compute, and then they did, all at once, with the force of a physical blow.

Elara hadn’t gotten better. The feeling of something? The thinking about tomorrow? It wasn’t a fresh start. It was an end.

The person who wrote this wasn’t Elara. It was someone else—a sibling, a parent, a landlord—going through her things after she was gone. The journal wasn’t a record of a life being lived; it was an artifact left behind.

He looked at his own entry from the day before, written just hours ago beneath her hopeful one.

July 18th (Leo’s entry): Smile:

Your entry from last year gave me hope.

A cold shame washed over him. He had been romanticizing a tragedy. He had been chasing a ghost, using her life as a blueprint for his own, while his own friends and his own world waited for him to just look up.

He closed the journal, the soft leather suddenly feeling like a lead weight. He had been so busy trying to live inside someone else’s story that he had neglected to write his own.

The next morning, Leo placed the Five-Year Journal on his shelf. It wasn’t a guidebook anymore. It was a reminder.

He picked up a blank notebook, the cheap kind from the drugstore. He opened it to the first page. He didn’t have prompts or questions. He just had today.

And he began to write.