E – Elegant but Empty notebooks

A to Z challenge: day 5
Theme: notebooks

The word “elegant” was just to please my daughter.

I have a madness that is incurable. All those notebooks that I buy and don’t use. I look at this picture and there is only 2 of them I bought myself. The other ones were given, as gifts. Well…

In some of them, there is only a date and a few words. In some others, I have lists of things I needed to buy the kids, for camps or whatever, also with dates. That way I can keep track of time…

Why would I keep them empty? I was 14 years old, when my dad threw a notebook in my face, yelling all my secrets for everyone to hear. Remember when you were 14? All the thoughts and feelings you wanted to keep for yourself, and writing them helped you make some sense out of it? After that episode, most of my notebooks stayed empty…

Sometimes I find it wild that I would keep a thing, that I finally find useless, because it doesn’t become “flat” in the middle, or I don’t like the colour, or it doesn’t feel… inspiring to write in them.

These notebooks have all one thing in common, on some page at the beginning, I ramble about writing and my renewed commitment to write EVERYDAY, in THIS notebook. I always thought that I would look cool in a café with THAT notebook, feeling like a writer from another era, who had only paper and ink to connect with the world.

But I keep them, because I would never throw away a notebook, just in case…

Tomorrow : Finding characters in notebooks (why would they hide in there?)

With great respect!
A.