Monday, September 26, 2011

notebooks

I have a lot of notebooks.

Some of them would more properly be referred to as "journals"; pretty, elegant things with leather(ish) covers and silky pages. Moleskine, Barnes and Noble, handmade by my uncle, discovered at a street vendor's stall in Florence.

Some of them were purchased at a dollar store and have cardboard Harry Potter covers.

Some are Mead notebooks with marbled covers, pasted over with comic strips and magazine clippings.

Some are bursting at the seams with boarding passes and concert programs, their pages closely scribbled over with rough drafts of poems and grocery lists and doodles and monthly budgets.

Some have a few scraps of a short story or a diary entry, but remain mostly pristine and expectant.

Some i have been filling since my freshman year of college. Some were filled long before even that.

And i can't stop buying them.

I bought two more Meads only last week because the marbled covers came in lime green and hot pink and not only black. Not that i have anything against the black ones, just that i already have about ten of them and i can't resist the rainbow seduction of a good back-to-school sale in CVS.

I buy notebooks faster than i can possibly fill them, especially now that so much of my journaling happens here instead of in Mead or Moleskine notebooks.

I have a conceited affection for the aesthetics of my own handwriting. I have an almost lustful desire for the feel of paper against the heels of my hands, of a pen gripped in my calloused fingers.

I carry a notebook with me to lunch like a security blanket, in case some pearl of wisdom or sparkling diamond of wit should drop into my head between bites of Greek salad. Or in case someone tries to interrupt my time of solitude and i have to look busy in order to avoid annoyances (and by "annoyances", i mean "nearly all forms of human interaction").

Sometimes i think i am more in love with writing poems about John than i am with John himself. And sometimes i think that that is as it should be. Either way, there are an awful lot of John-flavored poems in my notebooks these days.

This post is going nowhere fast. It's just empty words piled up on one another, like the empty Mead notebooks stacked at the foot of my bed. (Do you see what i did there?)

when the world comes to an end
i will go out in your arms
let the waters rise around us
let the hills come crashing down
should the earth fall from beneath us
i will only hold you closer
i'll trade the sunrise for your eyes
and gladly leave all else behind

And yes, all of this is the reason that i have updated my blog template to look more notebook-y. And yes, i did the update several weeks before this post was published. It's been on my mind a while.

No comments:

Post a Comment