Notebooks

I started a new notebook this week, and while I was copying the things over that I copy over every time, I counted. I have forty-one filled notebooks in a box in my closet, going back to the summer I was twelve. I keep meaning to throw out the early ones. I keep not doing it.

They're all the same kind now: plain black covers, lined pages, small enough for a coat pocket. I tried the expensive ones with the ribbon and the numbered pages, and I found I wouldn't write anything in them unless it was good, which defeats the purpose. A notebook has to be cheap enough to waste.

What's in them is mostly lines. Things people say on the bus. Things people say in meetings, which are often stranger. A woman at the next table in a café last spring told her friend, "He's not a bad man, he's just always somewhere else," and that went straight in, and some version of it has been in three games since. Overheard dialogue is the best kind because nobody wrote it. It has the shape of real speech, which runs on and doubles back and leaves the important thing unsaid.

Then there are lists. Books I mean to read. Letters I owe, crossed off as I answer them. Names I like, with no idea who they belong to. I name characters last, after I know them, but I collect the names for years first. Some of them have been waiting since college. When a character finally turns up who fits one, it feels less like choosing and more like a reunion.

There are drawings, too, if you can call them that. Maps of places that don't exist, floor plans of houses where a scene happens, so I know which door someone comes through. My handwriting in them gets worse the later it was written. At the bottom of some pages from two in the morning there's a line I can't read at all, and I've always been certain it was the best idea I ever had.

At the back of every notebook I keep the same three things, copied forward each time. My mother's phone number, though I've known it by heart since I was four. The address of a friend I write to. And a sentence my father said to me once on the dock, when I was small and impatient for a boat that was late: "It's coming whether you watch or not." I don't know why I've kept that one. I just have.