What do the notebooks say about me? The notebooks I’ve discarded, full of words and ideas, the notebooks I’ve kept to stow away in the shadows? They garner dust, the pages yellow and grow brittle. I keep them for no reason, perhaps to prove to myself that my obsession isn’t imaginary, it produces something physical, tangible. And why throw some away and not all of them? What makes me keep a notebook I’ve carried with me for a month, two months, spilling thoughts into it at each available moment, the notebook stained with all attitudes of those stolen moments lost in thought, my hands stained with ink, black, just as the notebook, black, becomes for me the only enduring proof that I have lived this life, here, with everyone else, a walking ghost among the living? What do the notebooks say about me?
