I bought myself a notebook the other day. It is beautiful; leather covered, slightly longer than an A5, described as a Reporter’s Notebook. It flips over the top (although not fully) and has a handy elastic to keep it secure when it is closed. It wasn’t cheap. But I was buying it for a purpose. It is to be the research notebook for my fiction writing. That is the plan. I imagine it filling with all sorts of useful quotes and references, ideas, beside me in the library, newspaper clippings glued in, it will become the source of inspiration and guidance while I travel my way through the story.
Except I am now too afraid to open it. To mark it. To begin something, only to lose interest or momentum or hope in the first few days. And then my beautiful notebook will become nothing more than another reminder of my uselessness. It’s a familiar line: if you don’t try, you can’t fail.
It isn’t even as though I have any ideas for stories to write. I am a completely dry well. I don’t want this writing to be yet another story of a small chapter of my life. I have many more of those that I can, should, and will write. But this notebook is intended for something imagined. I am so frightened to let myself go into the fantasy world that is somewhere in my mind. Is it normal to be afraid that you’ll lose yourself and won’t be able to find your way back? Or that if you allow yourself to see a life so magical and beautiful and intense, then the mind-numbing mundaneness that is the life I am leading will seem unbearable? By staying numb, will I fend off the disappointment that seems to underlie my days?
I have many notebooks with just a page or two written in them. I seemed to always be beginning a journal until I realised I couldn’t think of anything to say. It seems I need to feel that I am writing to an audience, to a reader. And there was no-one I would have wanted to have read my journals. Yet now, knowing complete strangers read this, seems natural. No-one will be hurt this way. Maybe I should be letting a few things be said to a few people in my life. Is it right to keep it to myself forever?
So how do I overcome this hesitation – it’s more than that, it’s a freezing, petrified seems too strong, more, that all my strength is sapped and I just am rooted to the spot.
Down the road from where I live, maybe four or five houses, there is a house that I assume is a halfway house, or an assisted living house. For the most part, there is nothing about this house that makes it stand out from all the others in the street, but sometimes, when I ma standing, waiting for my taxi, a woman paces backwards and forwards on the verandah, calling out, but not words. It’s a cry. Something about her moans seem frustrated, sometimes angry, and maybe I hear a longing in her voice? Or maybe I’m just making assumptions again. Some days it can be unsettling, in the same way that I feel agitated when I hear a crying baby. – not anger, but frustration that I cannot relieve the child its suffering – so I feel a sadness that I cannot do anything to console the woman who wails out at the world.
A regular sight when I am sitting, working at my desk, or collecting mail, or walking to or from my house for whatever reason, is a young man who I believe also lives in the same house down the street. He seems to be in his early 20s; sharp shoulderblades, pointed elbows, baggy jeans, a face with pronounced cheekbones and dark eyes under a slight frown. He is a figure of angles. He shuffles forward, his eyes fixed on the ground ahead of him, never making eye contact or acknowledging anyone passing by. Regular as clockwork he is out, walking past at mid-morning and again in the afternoon. I don’t know if he is walking to a destination or if he simply does a loop around the block.
His focus is so intense simply on where his next step will fill the place where his eyes stare. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle… and then he stalls. It is jarring to watch. It is like he is a wound up toy that has suddenly wound down. His eyes do not shift from that point ahead of him. His stooped posture doesn’t straighten. He makes no movement that suggests he is aware of anything around him at all.
Sometimes these frozen moments last for minutes. Long, long minutes where the tension builds and I wonder if I should go out and see if I can help him, although a part of me fears that my disturbing him might in fact snap him away from wherever he has gone, and will frighten him. But before I finally feel compelled to approach him, he suddenly seems to recover from this stasis and lurches back into his shuffle, again without any recognisable acknowledgement that he has been anywhere or that anything at all unusual has occurred.
I wonder about this young man, who I have never seen smile or laugh. I saw him only yesterday, with a friendly looking woman, social worker written all over her, her ID tag swinging around her neck as she walked beside him, chatting, while he gave no reply, no indication he knew she was even there.
I wonder what the world is like through his eyes, and where he goes when he leaves the vessel of his body behind. I hope it is a place of laughter, wherever it is.
