Chain of Memories
Perhaps you are familiar with this scenario: a drawer of shame, filled to the brim with things you tucked away once upon a time but never had the strength to properly deal with. For me, it came in the form of notebooks. Specifically, my college notebooks. I had the bad habit of using a notebook exclusively for every course I took, so many of them sat half-empty. A couple nearing the end of my college career were only 2-3 pages filled.
During what I would later dub as The Blank Period or The Fallow Years, I moved my notetaking almost exclusively online. In the fashion of someone who grew up low income, I couldn't bear archiving them for real. Instead, I grouped them along with some blank pads collected from events, seminars, one workplace to another. I might have stopped going to school and stopped replenishing my supply, but the acquisition of bound paper through everyday life occurrence eventually exceeded my capability of using them. About two dozens of them, menacingly awaiting. Indeed, when I could no longer bear the creative silence, I reached back to the stash. After all, why use fresh ones when you still have so many blank pages to make use of.
Boy was it difficult.
I keep the drawer loosely maintained since I occupy this place, but my previous rentals weren't so nice. These have been with me for a decade plus, so they went through the thick and thin of my mental state. During the worst years, cleaning was the furthest thing I could think of. They're mostly raggedy. Clean, but visibly beaten up. Some of them suffered through light water damage, mostly on the cover. Rust spots here and there. Scuffed corners. Survivors, all of them, perfectly serviceable.
But filling them brings back memories, feelings difficult to entangle. Not particularly unsavory, but intensely heavy. Of people. Of places. Of days. Of identities. Unsettling. I have very slowly chipped away at this "collection". Filled the last one with mindless doodles and thumbnail sketches, even did watery brushworks and ink sprays despite the paper being for standard writing. They bled all over, but it was alright. It would appear that they do just fine in their roles as "no stake catchall", but the sheer number is discouraging. Perhaps I'm seeking permission to just chuck them back in the drawer they belong to and just use the blanks. I don't know. Do people actually finish their school/academic notebooks?
That was rhetorical. Most people I know parted ways with their academic paraphernalia a long time ago, even with glee, sometimes almost directly after they walked out of thesis defense. Perhaps even made a bonfire out of them. They went on to lead vastly different lives, a foreigner to the author of these notes. The future was paperless, anyway.
There are people with children around me, all having the insatiable thirst to forge through blank pages armed with a set of crayon and boundless enthusiasm. When they ran out of books (children really go through these SO quickly), I would gladly donate some. Only the blanks, never the academic notes. I'm not sure. Little Polly wouldn't be opposed to scribble on top of a hastily scribed arcane incantation making up a wave function, that much is clear. She's already out there making her masterpieces on a pad stamped with the nation's intelligence department logo.
I have half a mind to bring all of them to a print shop, ask them to help me cut only the blank pages with an industrial paper trimmer, then rebind them all into a new book so I could use them without revisiting the notes. Or give to Little Polly. A good bookbinding exercise to prepare me for making my own watercolor sketchbook in the future, even. That sounds perfectly sane in my head, but I'm sure I'll find a way to put this off while I dutifully slog through another half-filled book.
Or two.
Maybe one day I would look back and laugh at this absurdity.