If my apartment ever caught fire, I know what I’d take.
Not my passport. Not my laptop. Not even the jacket I bought in Kyoto that still smells faintly of cedar and cigarette smoke.
I’d take the blue cloth box.
The one tucked quietly behind the extra blankets.
Inside it: seventeen notebooks.
My collection.
Not of stamps, or records, or photographs.
But of myself.
—
I started the first one at seventeen.
Bought it on a humid afternoon in Ljubljana, impulsively, after missing a train.
The paper was thin, the cover was soft, and I thought I wouldn’t finish it.
But I did.
And then I kept going.
It became two and a half notebooks per year.
On average.
Some years more, some years less.
But that’s the rhythm.
Two and a half chances every twelve months to write myself into existence.
Some people post. I wrote.
I wrote on buses and rooftops, in café corners and windowless rooms. I wrote while waiting for someone who didn’t show up, and again after they did. I wrote drunk. I wrote alone. I wrote when I didn’t have anything to say, just to remember the feeling of movement.
—
One of the notebooks still smells like Regensburg.
There was a year I lived there — a full year of wide skies and sunlight that lasted until almost ten at night.
It was the kind of place where even mistakes felt polite, where rivers carried thoughts downstream and strangers always returned your nods.
I wrote a lot that year.
Long walks along the Donau.
Even longer summer evenings with beer that came in tall glasses and made time feel slow in a good way.
Most of those entries are quiet.
Grateful.
Full of small pleasures — fresh cherries, a folded map, an old man who played jazz guitar near the bridge like he had nowhere else to be.
—
The year after, I ended up in Birmingham.
Different kind of place.
Different kind of year.
The pages turned darker. Not melodramatic — just gray, like the skies that refused to break open all winter.
Crappy flat. Strange landlord.
People who asked how you were but didn’t wait for the answer.
There’s an entry from November. It says only:
“Today I bought bread. It was the best part.”
Sometimes that’s all there is.
Sometimes that’s what keeps you going.
I didn’t love that year.
But I don’t regret writing it down.
Even pain deserves paper.
Especially pain.
—
If you stacked them all, the seventeen books, they’d rise just high enough to rest your elbow on.
Some are bound in leather.
Some are softcover, already fraying.
A few have ticket stubs taped to the back pages — trains I barely remember riding.
Receipts for meals I do.
And through them, the seasons repeat.
Warm summers.
Gloomy winters.
People arriving.
People fading.
The same doubts with different handwriting.
The same hopes, slightly bruised, but still there.
—
What surprises me most is not what I wrote.
It’s what I didn’t.
Whole heartbreaks reduced to a single sentence.
Life-changing conversations left unmentioned.
And yet a bowl of ramen in Kyushu gets three pages of description,
down to the exact shape of the naruto swirl floating on top.
That’s how memory works.
We don’t choose what stays.
We just record what we can
before it fades.
—
Wabi-Sabi Between the Lines
I don’t read them often.
Only sometimes—when I’m not sure who I am and need to remember who I was.
When I flip through them, I see the cracks.
Pages ripped. Ink blurred.
Whole months where nothing made it to paper.
Mistakes circled. Apologies crossed out.
But I never feel embarrassed.
Only tender.
Because that’s what a diary is.
Not a performance.
Not an archive of brilliance.
Just presence.
Proof that you were there.
That you tried.
That you changed.
And that somehow, through the years,
you kept moving.
—
So yes, that’s my collection.
Seventeen notebooks.
Two and a half each year.
A life in pieces.
In layers.
In loose pages that smell like different countries.
And when I hold them all at once,
it feels like I’m holding something sacred.
Not perfect.
Not complete.
But honest.
And that
is enough.
life 