Keara's Love Joural

A close reading and subsequent analysis of fourth grade Keara's love life.

In the summer of 2020, at the height of my Covid quarantine stir-craziness, I decided to clean my room. Not just a normal tidying but a deep clean - a dumping out drawers that haven’t been opened in years type of clean - a full throttle, Marie Kondo clearing house clean. Usually, I’d be far too lazy to attempt such a tall order. But this was right around the point of quarantine in which I had started sitting in the front yard and looking through binoculars for fun. I was that bored. 

As I rifled through stacks of old binders, photographs, ticket stubs, and the like, I started to feel less like Marie Kondo and more like an archeologist exhuming an ancient tomb. After three hours of unearthing precious relics from my past, I realized that I would hate being an archeologist. This was tough work! And my back was starting to hurt! 

Just as I was about to throw in the towel, I found my Rosetta Stone. An old red folder upon which the words “Keara’s Love Joural” had been scrawled in what was clearly a child’s crude handwriting. And no, the “Joural” part is not a typo. The word was misspelled on the folder. I opened it to find a firsthand account of my fourth grade love life. 

Like any passionate archeologist, I was very excited to share my discovery. I rushed downstairs to show my family the little red folder. The pages spoke of desire, forbidden love, secrets, betrayal, heartbreak. Despite the dramatic tone of the journal, we couldn’t help but laugh. Even I, myself, was taken aback by how delusional and dramatic I could be at only nine years old. It was simply and objectively hilarious. 

While the passionate ramblings of fourth grade Keara still make me chuckle, they also make me reflect (in a sort of Carrie Bradshaw starting an essay kind of way). In ten years from now, will I look back on my current diary and laugh at all the things I had gotten wrong about love in my twenties? Do I really know anything about love? Or am I just as delusional as I was in fourth grade? I can’t help but wonder…

In order to investigate this further, you’ll have to see the pages for yourself. I’ll try to provide some necessary context and explanation as we go along. Let’s Begin. 

Much like an episode of The Bachelorette, the love journal begins by introducing the various suitors of Wood Acres Elementary School’s fourth grade. In nine year old Keara’s defense, I too would be “omg momented” if I suddenly found myself in love with four boys. Loving one person is overwhelming enough! But the herd was quickly thinned to the final two: Connor and Duglass (yes, I was butchering the spelling of his name).

 And the final rose goes to Duglass! I’m not sure how I came to this decision as I had never actually spoken to him before. Douglas (aka Duglass) transferred to our school midway through the year and had quickly become the talk of Mr. Kapusnick’s fourth grade class. He had blonde, Justin Bieber style hair and played lacrosse. Though we had yet to exchange words, our stolen glances at recess sparked what I believed was an instant connection. I would soon find out that many others shared this same sentiment. 

I know what you’re thinking - who the hell is Leon? Allow me to explain: Leon was a foreign exchange student from Estonia that I had also never spoken to before. This was partly due to us being in different classes, but mostly due to Leon not speaking any English. But after months of pining, Leon was old news. Douglas was today’s headline! 

My fail-proof plan for capturing his heart was to be an absolute bitch to him. I had seen enough rom-coms at this point to know that being mean to a boy made you seem “different” and “not like other girls.” But what I didn’t know was that this method only works if you look like Kiera Knightley. I did not look like Kiera Knightley. I wore sparkly tank tops paired with Adam Sandler-style basketball shorts and black merrells. And of course, no fourth grade Keara look was complete without my matted mop of unbrushed hair. 

But just as I was about to put my plan in motion, a Judas emerged. 

Yes, you read that right. Shannon, my best friend in fourth grade, was also in love with Douglas. It was a classic love triangle (except for the fact that Douglas did not know either of us existed). In Shannon’s defense, I had not yet revealed to her my love for Douglas.

Fourth grade was gossip central - I was surrounded by snakes in the grass. I couldn’t trust anyone to keep my secret, not even my best friend. The only person I could trust was this very journal. But not for much longer it seems, as we are now at the final page of Keara’s Love Joural. The grand finale. 

So clearly I had just learned the word “crap” right before writing these last few pages. If I could give my younger self any editing advice it would be to pare down the “crap” repetition. 

Even so, I get where Little Keara is coming from. I had grown up on disney movies like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, movies filled with dashing princes who fell in love at first sight. I remember more than one recess that involved me standing alone amongst the trees and  singing softly to myself, secretly hoping that a boy would hear my irresistible voice and become beguiled. 

I had to face a harsh reality: no boy was going to fall in love with me at first sight and most boys wouldn’t fall in love with me at all. Walt Disney had lied to me. I had never felt so betrayed. I could have never imagined that my future self would look back on my moment of righteous anger and laugh! 

Though it is objectively hilarious, there is a small part of me that feels sorry for Little Keara. Every time I read the line “boys only get like that in middle and highschool,” I involuntarily release a pity-fueled, “Awww.” Little Keara was just so wrong on that one. She believed that boys would get better in middle and high school. Ha! Little did she know, they were about to get sooooo much worse. 

At its core, Keara’s Love Joural tells the story of a young girl learning a hard lesson: that love doesn’t happen like it does in the movies. But frankly, I’m not sure the lesson stuck. 

Despite the romantic disappointments of middle school, I entered high school absolutely certain that I would get a boyfriend. Once my dating pool widened to beyond my grade, there had to be someone for me, right? Alas, no dice. I spent my high school years occupying the “perpetually single” role of my friend group, watching enviously as everyone around me fell in love with each other. 

I graduated with both honors and a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt like I had been cheated out of one of life’s formative experiences - I would never know what it felt like to be a teenager in love. I had officially aged out. 

This time around, Walt Disney Studios wasn’t my saboteur. It was John Hughes and all his amazing coming-of-age comedies! It was the CW network and their extensive slate of romantic teen dramas! It was that hack William Shakespeare and his stupid Romeo & Juliet! Every art form since the renaissance had assured me that I would find love and they had all lied. 

But did I learn my lesson? Ha! Of course not. Post graduation, I became steadfastly convinced that college would be my romantic renaissance. Girls and boys galore! Not only would I have my pick of the litter hookup wise, but I would surely secure a relationship in no time. Yes, I had been wrong all the previous times I set my romantic expectations too high, but this time was different! 

Spoiler alert: It was not different. 

I was two years into college and still had yet to fall in love. But just as I was beginning to lose hope… it happened. I fell in love! And guess what? It felt exactly how the movies told me it would! I suddenly understood why romantic love was so hard to find - nothing so incredible could be so common. 

There’s a journal entry of mine that was written during that relationship. It reads: “Being human has never felt so good.” Much like Keara’s Love Joural, I can’t read this entry without letting out an involuntary “Awww.” 

But all good things must come to an end, and when this good thing in particular ended, it broke my heart. Cue yet another episode of righteous love-fueled anger, eerily reminiscent of Keara’s Love Joural, Page 5. 

Nothing had prepared me for how heartbreak felt in real life. Nothing - no film, no TV show, no play, no song, no poem - nothing! That old, familiar sense of betrayal reared its ugly head once more. Why hadn’t anybody warned me? Sure, they told me that “love hurts,” but they didn’t tell me that it hurt like this. And they didn’t tell me that it hurts for so long. 

When a character gets their heart broken on a TV show, it usually takes them one or two episodes to bounce back. But even at six months post-breakup, I was nowhere near bouncing. I was still learning to crawl. For more insight into where I was emotionally at this point, here is a journal entry of mine from that time: 

“Going through a breakup is like coming down from molly. It’s not a dull pain though. I am completely fine, not thinking about it for most of the day, and then it hits me and I fall apart. It’s a sharp, acute pain - like some mystical love bone breaking inside me and tearing through my ribs. I don’t want to be in pain anymore, but I don’t want to not be in love with him. Isn’t that a funny thing?”

Unlike Keara’s Love Joural, I don’t laugh when I read this entry. But it does elicit from me the same involuntary, pity-fueled “Awww.” 

So, the next time I feel angry or betrayed or completely crushed by love (and I’m sure there will be a next time), I expect that I will once again turn to my journal for solace. And when I do, I’ll remind myself that no matter how awful things feel in the moment, I will one day look back on the words I’m writing and go, “Awww.” 

Hopefully, that will make me feel a little bit better.