Indicative Notebooks

My brain decided to have a bit of a wander yesterday. I’ve been doing so well; hardly any panic attacks or stress thoughts. I thought I’d got to a place where I’d decided to just be happy but you never know what silly little thing could set you off. The worst bit of all this, for me, is how silly it makes me feel, not least because I can’t really explain what is going on. Pulling yourself back together each time your brain sets off on a private adventure just makes you stronger.

Feeling stronger, I wrote about indicative stoats and it made me happy. Then I went to bed and my brain decided it was time to continue processing all the things I didn’t understand, that stop me being able to breathe properly and make me make a fool of myself in public. Luckily, I have a notebook by the bed, just for those moments.

By 3am I was almost back to my old self and started to write down all the words that rhyme with vote: stoat, goat, moat, throat, boat (oh, how I love a rowing boat), note, bloat, promote, refloat, misquote. The indicative stoat could be the new Gruffalo.

Then I started thinking about notebooks. Notebooks are brilliant. Without mine I would be a blubbering mess, rocking in the corner, barely able to mutter more than, “B...ber...ber...b...ber...berr...b..Brexit.” I have an every day book so that I know what’s going on, the by the bed book for random midnight thoughts, the family history book because you never know when that might come in handy, the get my head around going to Japan book, the books what I’ve read book, the Elephant book where I write about death and cancer, the password book because I can’t remember anything now, and I’m sure there are others. I need a notebook to keep track of the notebooks. This should probably be called the indicative notebook.

All notebooks, I suppose, by their nature are indicative. When clearing out my parents belongings we found lots of notebooks. We looked in them to see if we could grasp an essence of the people we had lost. The funny thing was that there wasn’t one full book. Most had writing on only the first two pages. I wondered what my children would find in my notebooks if I still have notebooks when I finally die at the grand old age of 42. (It will be 42 because that’s the number I decided to stick with). Will they look at the page of indicative stoats who live in the moat and conclude that everything wrong in their life is suddenly explained?

My mum had one book that briefly told the story of her life with her own illustrations. I say briefly because it took the first two pages and the rest of the notebook was blank. It is beautiful and I will treasure it forever. She wrote about the things she had wanted to be when she grew up and how she also wanted to be able to fly.

There was also a small unused notebook, with a silver cover and black pages. I took it home, thinking that I could use it to leave the kind of notebook I’d like my children to find. I bought some white ink and wrote, “Learning to Fly,” on the first page. That’s as far as I’ve got, which seems quite appropriate for one of my parents’ notebooks.