This project started years ago when I was playing keys in a touring band. We'd been at it for several weeks and had a few nights booked at several clubs around New York City. To make things easier for us, instead of leaving the city every night, we had been invited to stay with some friends who lived in the North Bronx in a fairly decent rent-controlled apartment. We were supposed to stay only one night, but as it turned out, we ended up staying a week and that is a completely different story. The extra time ended up with me getting bored which is what really started this whole thing.

    The apartment had been passed around among friends for years—decades!—so it had become very lived in. An extremely eclectic collection of furniture and other objects which had been left by previous tenants had accumulated over the years: a couple of lamps from the 1970s, lots of art from the '80s, and numerous nondescript cheap chairs and tables decorated the rooms. There was at least one couch in every room, and that included the kitchen. There were three couches in the living room, and walls of shelves filled with books that had been left behind either accidentally or on purpose over the decades. The apartment wasn't shabby or dirty, it was just cluttered, which did have the benefit of softening any street noise that might make its way up to the fifth floor. So at least it was quiet.

    During our stay I happened upon a box of books behind the couch I was sleeping on. None of our friends or the other roommates knew who the box belonged to. As far as they knew, the box had been left behind years before any of them had moved in. The books in the box were never shelved, mainly because the shelves had no room left, but also because the contents were both personal(at least to the person who left them) while at the same time completelely unspectacular.

    I rummaged through the box, more out of boredom than curiosity, and found an old handwritten diary. Several pages had been torn from it and some of the pages that remained were so stained from mold and god-knows-what-else that they weren't legible, but for some reason the parts that I could read really caught my attention.

    From what I could tell it belonged to a 15 or 16 year old girl named Alice who had run away from home. Most of it was the angsty kind of writing you'd expect to find in the diary of a teenage girl, but some of it was just heartbreaking. In the span of a few short months it seems like she just spiraled out of control, swept along by currents stronger than her ability to navigate—prostitution, drugs, extremely unhealthy relationships. The final entries detailed her desire to go back home. Again, I'm not sure why it hit me so hard; it was probably because I had been on the road with the band for so long that I was homesick myself.

    I wondered where this girl was now? Did she ever make it back home? Did she even realize that she'd left her diary behind? How old was she now? As far as I could tell the box was probably only a few years old, ten at most, which meant that Alice was probably close to my age and maybe younger, but since there was no year associated with the diary I couldn't make any assumptions.

    One of the most fascinating things about the diary was the fact that another girl—or woman, I have no idea how old she was—named Summer had written little notes in the margins of it. From entries in the diary I figured out that Summer was from Alice's hometown; a friend (or something more) from before Alice ran away. I scanned through some of the other books in the box and some of those had notes in the margins as well. It looked like this entire box might have belonged to Alice, but the diary was the only thing that revealed anything about her. The other books were just kind of random. A few beat-generation poetry books, a how-to-play-guitar book, those sorts of things.

    A few days later, when we were leaving to get on our way to the next gig, I asked if I could keep the diary. I wanted to take the entire box, but the bus was already packed tight with gear. Our friends didn't seem to care about the diary one way or the other so they let me keep it. I've had the diary ever since. I read it sometimes when I'm trying to recall that time in my life, and to this day I still wonder where Alice might be.

    So, several years ago—or several years later, depending on your point of view—I started thinking about a project based on the diary. I realize that a project based on a found diary is not an entirely new or novel concept, not even that creative really, but I kind of got a little obsessed with the whole thing. It's been a process of fits and starts. Sometimes I worked feverishly on it and other times I put the thing down for months, but I think I've finally pieced together ... something.