Coloring outside the lines
A quest for the perfect notebook
Four days prior to takeoff, she stood in San Francisco’s Patrick & Co, her fingertips tracing the texture of a dizzying selection of notebooks, discerning just the right page texture, weight and design. Even the store was intentionally chosen. In a city filled with writers, seekers and dreamers, notebooks are easy to find, but she decided this weathered and dingy 150-year-old stubborn relic of Market Street’s finer days was the notebook purveyor best fit for a journey that is intended to be a return to her core.
In the end, she selected two – a thin but large soft cover volume with a rustic floral design and smooth lined pages for class itself, and a smaller hard-cover midnight blue Moleskin to carry in her purse on her intended wanderings through the City of Light. She imagined herself seated at a small bistro table at Les Deux Magots on Saint Germaine, sipping an afternoon coffee or perhaps a glass of white, looking out at the people in their fine cashmere, writing, thinking… about what she wasn’t yet sure. But she has discovered that with space, the ideas come for her.
Two notebooks, the laptop and the beginnings of a book she has to write but isn’t yet sure anyone should read. The book has the makings of a nuclear missile, elements within that demonstrate reclaimed power to she who detonates it, but the capacity to leave everyone around her so obliterated there may be no one left with whom to enjoy the unburdening. Or at least that is what she is afraid of.
The notebooks are a critical accessory in the costuming of her journey. Like a child before the first day of the new school year, there was a haircut that didn’t turn out quite as she had hoped (the face framing layers are perfection, but she really should have left well enough alone on the length); meticulous curation of the clothing: the gold aviator sunglasses and the yellow-tinted yes-I’m-middle-aged-but-I’m-still-fucking-cool reading glasses, her favorite black tutu skirt and three perfect lipglosses. Only the shoes weren’t quite right, but that’s what shopping is for.
Though she seemed preoccupied with the external image, she spent the last several weeks before the trip priming her spirit and setting her boundaries in preparation to turn inward.
On the day of departure, she slaved through a yoga practice in a 102 degree studio. She marveled as her handstand suspended with a rooting she hadn’t before felt. She repeated to herself over and over again the mantra the teacher used in class the day prior. “And now, I am here.”
After the class closed, she raced to the car, just an hour and a half before she needed to leave for the airport. The suitcases weren’t quite packed. The house not yet clean. She needed to call her dad, she needed to write a check for the house keeper. As she drove, she dictated additional reminders to herself to the list on her phone.
Just as the next right thing clarified in her mind, the phone rang… a sobbing child at the other end and the familiar gut punch trauma trigger of being called to serve everyone but herself. She felt the precious bubble of journey had been holding in her heart pop, its remnants dripping like tears through her limbs. She pulled the car over as the twisting in her gut traveled to her rapidly dizzying brain. With a breath she gathered her intention, her self-love, her steel and erected a wall.
“Honey, you are fine. More than fine. You have a beautiful life, you are stronger than you know and you are thriving. And I need to get myself together or I will miss my flight, and I am not willing to do that. I will call you back, once I have myself together.”
She hung up the phone, and stared ahead. Every fucking time, she thought. These children are determined to kill me. She breathed deep again, and with an exhale she reached down to the floor, scooping up the scattered beads of magic and willing them back to their rightful place as a glistening globe, then parked the fragile bubble back inside her heart where it belongs.
The Uber would arrive in a half hour to take her to SFO. She gathered the essentials for her backpack. The midnight blue Moleskin belonged there for musings on the 10 hour flight. Better to unwrap it now, she thought. Carefully gripping her cuticle scissors so as to not damage the fabric, she pierced the cellophane then tugged to unpeel this blank slate for her becoming.
Opening it for an inaugural creasing of the spine, she gasped.
It was unlined. How am I going to craft this with no lines?!?
And then she laughed. Maybe the lines had been the enemy all along.