I am one of those people who has legitimate and primal and fundamental personal needs for stationery. Good stationery is a human right. Notebooks make everything better. One of the first bits of advice I will give anybody beginning a research degree is to buy yourself all the stationery that your heart desires.
The only problem with this is that some are too pretty to use. And of those that you do use, you reach a point when you do not wish to break their backs nor rip pages out of them, and so let them slide towards the back of the shelf to the fog of forgotten things.
The one benefit of such a loosely functional system is that you tend to recover them at some point, and find the work of the once-you inside these pages. These are photograph albums in their way; delicious little snapshots of the thoughts and feelings of a time once forgotten, and that is the allure of the abandoned notebook. They will always be found again.
I am opening up a brown notebook today, unlined, and with a slim purple ribbon to mark its pages. I found poetry and bare, sparse pages that sang to be used.
I shall.
1.
to be
the other
is more powerful
than you’ll ever know
2.
the butterfly
that lands
with the weight of bricks
3.
to be selfish
is an affirmation
Daisy May Johnson 