Backtrack to the Beginning

I probably think of a million ways to start a sentence at least a million times a day. That sentence rolls and spirals and I feel inspired until somehow, the ideas stop and I backtrack, and I get stuck at the beginning. I have a notebook that I carry in my purse everywhere I go for the minute, or even the second, that it takes to write down the spark of an idea that sizzles and diminishes by the time I want to turn it into a flame, and yet still I carry this notebook.

My notebook is full of dead ends, ideas stuck on the same lonely page, coffee rings resting delicately on a page while the next page is wrinkled from being open in the rain. Someone looked over at my battered notebook in class a few months ago, asking why it looks so beat up and I didn’t register what that meant in the moment.

Beat up? How? 

I took a moment to actually notice the condition of my notebook with its back cover mostly torn off, doodles swelling and overtaking the front page, water mating with paper making the entire notebook three times its original size. Who cares about the state of my notebook?

Flipping open the book, I showed my classmate that my notebook might look messy and uncared for, but it was actually full of life.

We flipped through pages of calm writing next to polaroid pictures with fading ink; we attempted to decipher my scrawled writing in hurried moments of both happiness and fear; we smelled the pages upon pages of flowers pressed deeply into the pages, kept for surprises as I flipped through, the familiar smells bringing me back to memories I hadn’t written about. I was asked why I thought it was a good idea to have my notebook out as I ran through a storm, why there were inspirational quotes or empty words written across the covers and randomly throughout the book. I had to explain the method to my madness: life. 

As I near the end of my third notebook since I began my journey in college, the most interesting part is seeing how I grew into the person I am now. By reading over my words from when I thought I had my world figured out, to finding the next page littered in tear stains as I realized I was back at square one, I could see every step of growth. And that was even more beautiful than writing the first words of every idea.

Witnessing the growth within myself became my own little piece of art, brightening up my spirit and reminding me I had so much more of life left to enjoy. And even though my pen is slow some days, it never stops.

Sometimes we might just have to backtrack to the beginning of our journey to see exactly why we began walking in the first place.