Written for a writer’s meet where the prompt was to give a voice to an inanimate object.
Tomorrow is the First Anniversary of my failed debut.
Yes, a whole year has passed, since I had been brought home from the bookstore, only to be left as blank as the day I was bound. As a notebook with ruled paper, I had spent months on a shelf in the bookstore, waiting to be purchased.
My shelf was home to several other notebooks with lined pages, just like me. On other shelves were books filled with words. These books told me that their words told stories, created from emptiness, and given life by the imaginations of their writers. Some books told tales of mystery, others made people laugh, and some giggled to me that they were about romance.
I asked the lined notebooks near me if we would also be filled with words that told stories.
“Words – yes, stories – no,” I was told. “You are a notebook. Your destiny will likely be to contain notes taken by a student, numbers written by an accountant, or even ‘minutes of meetings’ jotted by a professional.”
I was confused. I thought that if you wanted minutes, you would go to the clock store. Notes and accounts did not sound as exciting as stories, but I felt that anything would be better than page after page of blank lines.
And so, I was excited when the day finally came on which I was picked up off the shelf, paid for at the counter, and taken home to become someone’s notebook.
But not just any notebook …
As soon as we reached home, I heard the person who bought me tell his wife that he was going to take me to a writers’ meet up that was scheduled for the coming Saturday. My pages curled in excitement – I had been purchased by a writer! He said that he hoped this meet would be a way for him to revive a long dormant passion. I was all set to make my debut that very weekend.
Unfortunately, it has been nearly a year since that day, and I am yet to have a single word written in me. What happened, you ask?
We missed the first meeting due to lunch invitations from friends. The next weekend, my writer’s kid fell sick. The week after that, my writer himself fell sick. Weekend after weekend, something would happen that kept him away from his self-professed passion. And then, there were weekends where nothing would happen. I would see him on the couch, with an active thumb and eyes as blank as the lines within me.
I had the company of other books on my shelf. They told me that they were diaries. In fact, they were filled with the ‘minutes of meetings’ that I had heard about back in the book store. Curious, I asked them what it felt like to be filled with these written ‘minutes’.
“Glorious,” said the diaries, “Minutes of meetings are the pinnacle of the science of record keeping. They are the divine offspring of brevity and bullshit. In the spirit of brevity, words are not allowed to flow wildly in paragraphs. Instead, they are lined up like a firing squad using a mighty literary device known as bullet points. And, in the spirit of bullshit, minutes of meetings contain delusional celebrations of the most trivial success stories, and masterful understatement of failures and delays.”
“That sounds impressive,” I said.
“O ho! But that’s not all,” the diaries responded. “It may sound a bit dry, but it takes a well bound book to read between its own lines and relish the hidden stories we contain. Underlying the bullet points, we find a subtext of vicious interpersonal rivalries, stifling politics, and social psychosis. It’s all there – you just need to look for it.”
After hearing from them, I thought it actually sounded quite fun to be used as a corporate diary. Any words written by a person’s hand would tell stories of conflict, intrigue, disappointment, and hope. Honestly, bullet points sounded better than the emptiness filling my pages.
Months passed. My covers were dulled by dust. I found myself buried behind ever deeper layers of stationary, discarded toys, and malfunctioning gadgets.
I had given up all hope of words to call my own, and my only satiation came from the occasional stories that the diaries would share with me. One day, I heard the diaries bickering amongst themselves. Something unusual had been written in one of them, and they were all arguing on how to decipher the subtext.
“What was it that he wrote?” I enquired.
“No bullet points,” said the diary, “just three words – I’ve had it.”
“I’ve had it?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what we are trying to figure out,” barked the diaries and went back to their bickering.
And then, it happened. An arm swept away months of clutter that had accumulated around me, picked me up, and dusted me off. I felt the touch of a pen’s nib, and felt ink seep through my paper. And for the first time, words appeared on one of the lines, in one of my pages: “Chapter One.”
Cover Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
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