Tectonic Movement

A notebook is in my pocket.

I carry it with me, a talisman to otherwise forgotten thoughts.

I flip through the pages now and then to reassure myself. Doodles, lists, sketches, cartoons, fictions, histories, and essays. They are still there.

There too are the scratchings of rock, petroglyphs from those who had accompanied me. A short lyric by Eric Carson. “The F Drill” by Isaac Cohen. The political cartoons of Daniel Evans. They lie in the strata, barely discernible in the geological record.

If buried under a layer of mud, would it survive. The inch thick, 30 year old cellulose would be wetted, pasted, and slowly eaten away. What it holds of a life would surrender to the weight of time. Only reprinting these words would lead to their afterlife. The book dies, but ideas last forever.

In its pages are also sketches, and fragments of stories, of lives that were never lived. Lives that only live in these words. Would it be murder to destroy them without giving them light? Did they share the breath of a thousand lives, left unrecorded? Would it matter, in the long run?

I flip the pages without reading, knowing every word. Old smells waft up from the paper. Memories of a locker on a ship, long since cut to pieces. Mountains traversed on the top of the world with rock and wet moss under foot, the sting of Devil’s Club still fresh in my hand. Buttered popcorn in a Quonset hut movie theater with uncomfortable chairs and too much salt. The waxy air of a kerosene heater in an airplane hanger. A moonless walk down a long muddy road during a cold Alaska summer.

It weighs in my pocket, tugging, reminding me. There were days, it says, yes there were days when you were young and scared and foolish. There were days when you prayed to a god you didn’t know, and days when you cursed his name. Those days are gone, but they will not go away.

I refuse to live in the past. But I still carry it with me.