Lost Notebook

I had a busy week. Running around, papers to grade, coffee and lunch meetings, blah blah. Different subways kept being on delays or re-routed or not working. One commute from one professional drink to our house should only have been two subways but because of various things, it ended up being five transfers instead. I’ve been reading a 900 page de Kooning biography and had it clutched to me, also keeping it out of my bag because my back is bad, and I was trying to even out the load.

I had my notebook out too because my new book is about an artist on a similar timeline to de Kooning’s. On all the various commutes, sitting at bars waiting for lunch or drink dates to arrive, I’d been taking notes. The notebook was one of the loveliest I’ve ever owned. My little sister got it for our daughter about a year ago but then it was lined and she re-gifted it to me.

I am strange about notebooks. Strange about money. Cheap. Once, at work in New Jersey and suddenly without a notebook, I went to the fancy bookstore in town and stood for twenty minutes trying to decide which notebook to buy, but they all felt too expensive. It felt absurd, insane, hubristic, to spend twenty dollars on something I would put my own writing in. I left the bookstore and went to the CVS down the block and bought a tiny four-dollar notebook instead.

Of course I couldn’t stand that notebook. It was too small, the pages were too flimsy. The spiraling hurt my hand. It got shoved into a drawer. I have other notebooks I have been gifted or that I have splurged on when they are on sale, but none as nice as this one my sister gave our daughter that then she gave to me. It had notes from about a year of working, dates and timelines, my accounting so far, of the word count I’ve been accruing in this new book to make myself feel emboldened, etc.

I went to write in the notebook once I had landed at whatever coffee shop I was camping out at between these various meetings, errands etc and it was gone. I left it somewhere, obviously. Likely on the subway. Likely, I got immersed in the de Kooning book and then the train conductor alerted us that the train I thought was going one place was now going another and I got off quickly and left the notebook there.

This is a big city. I will not ever get it back.

I sat a moment wondering if my body might decide to feel devastated by this. I went to make a note on something in the novel document and didn’t have the date I wanted, and I got a little squirmy but then I opened the de Kooning and found the date again.

My body decided to be fine about the notebook. It’s just a notebook. It was very beautiful, and I liked looking at it. I liked thinking about my little sister who is far away in London when I did. My sister has much better taste than I do. I wouldn’t even know where to buy a notebook like that. I wondered about whatever random thing I’d scrolled in there that I might then discover a few months from now that would answer some big question about the book that I’m writing, and it felt a little thrilling, how the answer will, it might be, a little different now.

Two years ago, when I was finishing The Float Test, this happened with my computer. It’s a long story but I left it in the security line. A little bit the same thing: I’d been making notes on the big hulking printed manuscript and then I finished those notes, and I went into my backpack to pull out my laptop except it was gone.

It was—and please know I don’t lose this term lightly—a little bit like a Kafka story, trying to get it back. There was no way to make a phone call, only email, long very dated photographs to scroll through of laptops that had been found. Mostly the websites and automated emails said you had to wait and so I waited. It was a very busy time in the semester. My husband gave me his laptop. People kept saying the word “backedup?” to me, but I ignored them. I had a printed out copy of my novel, I decided if everything else was gone forever, maybe there was something there to think about?

Six weeks later Terry called me from TSA and they had found my laptop. I was running when he called me, endorphins, all that. I asked him if he wanted to get married, but he refused. My sweet agent, who lives in LA, went and got the laptop for me. Likely Terry was relieved I didn’t come.

In both instances I thought a lot about what I still had or have when large chunks of work go missing, just disappear, about my strange relationship to (not) preserving my work, which lives somewhere between distaste and destruction, and how maybe that’s not great. I have no copies of any of the newspapers or magazines in which my work has been published. I’ve been known to throw stacks of old copies of my books out in front of our apartment when I’m sad.

And also, a thing I think is no sentence, newspaper, notebook, or book is more precious and important than whatever the germ, the churn, the pull is. All of it is also, just your bloody fucking heart in language after all. And you’re stuck with that. Whatever shape it takes the next time, maybe that’s the even better sharper shape, the shape you might finally decide you want to take better care of after all.