Book of red, crimson. I do not remember this time, only vaguely aware of the simple emotion and language. Words that feel natural and easy to read even as my eyes lose their blue. A language that, as claimed by this lone leatherbound witness, once captured entire days of memories. And like any dead language, there are few who could decipher these pages; there is only one, barely legible account of this society. I have to squint now. What is "mo9"? The rubbery imprints of a dull pencil stretched like flimsy fishing line from the shores of time
Lil red... Lil blue... Can we go feed the birds? She means your parrots, I tell him.
But the blue book ignores all that. A learn'd astronomer in Sperry's who always has his papers on his desk. The ancient scrolls of the dead: charts, figures, numbers. These mechanical stipples were laid with such inhuman precision. To-do lists, agendas, planners, blueprints for always eating right, sleeping better, working more. But better sleep is typically dreamless. Between wrist blots on the margins and polygonal ballpoint pen print spaced neatly between the lines, there is the folly of the utilitarian life. Even still, its pages far outnumber the red book's. A textbook up to bat against a storybook. But at the end of the line, which would you read?
The human hand should not write so demonically as to invoke the word "self-help".Red book, I wish I'd given you more. For in those few months in 2014 and 2015 where I'd written in you, I captured more of my life by pencil than in the calculus of modernity.