HM THEMES

A few weeks ago my mother surprised me with a brand new notebook, its pages blank and staring wide-eyed awake at me. I swear that when I open it to the first page I can hear it pleading for the caress of a ball point pen, the bitten on pencil that never seems to sharpen. It’s still sitting on my desk. I’ll walk by it several times a day, trace its corners with my fingers, a well-practiced eye. I don’t consider myself a writer by any means, but I know about notebooks. I know what kind of paper to use if I want to coax words out by their roots. I know what size to get for which bags I own; I know the thickness, the weight I need for certain things. And this particular notebook, it’s lovely. It’s one of those notebooks you’d want to fill with love letters and pressed flowers and stick it up on the topmost shelf of your closet to forget about for a few years until an uncharacteristic bout of spring cleaning smothers you. The binding’s a soft, dove gray color. The color of beginnings. But it sits on my desk, slowly collecting dust. My mother, of course, she asks if I’ve written in it. Asks what stories, what poems grace its vanilla musk pages. I can’t bring myself to tell her the truth: that those who write don’t have a use for notebooks, don’t need them or hunger after them the way the world thinks they do. That the worst thing you can give to a writer is a book filled with blank pages. That all we really need to write on is skin. This is where the words come from, after all. But I say none of these things. The most I can manage to write in the notebook is my name, a few lines of haiku. So it isn’t a lie when I say, “Of course. Of course I’ve written in it.” I’m not a writer by any means. But I can write my way out of almost anything.

August 19th ∙ 67
tagged: prose  personal 
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    This girl… wow.
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