The Leaning Tower of

It started almost by accident, rising out of the rubble of my room.

These tokens of my ambition accumulate, some with a bookmark slid between their brittle layers; marking my intentions, my milestones and my aborted adventures.

Some I will go back to and some I may never wet their last page with the spittle of my finger and thumb.  They are destined to be unfulfilled.

There are several books I have managed to read once and perhaps I would like to read them again.  I hear second and subsequent readings lend even more detail to the darting eye and pensive mind.  However, there are just too many new pieces to be read.

All too often I browse online-bookshops, picking out treats and classics, recommendations and appetising synopses.  I have often found myself drifting into shops, picking and flicking and procuring right there.
There is great pleasure in buying a book, reading the synopsis and sometimes brushing to the last page looking for spoilers or clues and being left puzzled.

There are just too many good books left to read.  Which I suppose is a good complaint to have.
But if I hope to make a dent in them, I should probably start with that leaning tower in my room.  Certainly before it topples over.

Space

How much space makes a home?
Four walls, a roof and somewhere to lay my weary body. . .

I look at the heaps of clothing washed and dried, waiting to be sorted and tidied away into my drawers or hung in the shaky skeletal cage I use as a wardrobe.  In the corner, behind the door there is a growing mountain of dirty laundry held within a blue IKEA bag.  It will be washed and it will join the heap.  My little table and the top of my chest of drawers are littered with scraps, books and a collection of miscellaneous items, weird, wonderful and random. By my bed there are books, diaries, notebooks, cards celebrating a variety of occasions, some lego and other ornaments.

There is barely enough space for my possessions.
Some I stow in boxes under my bed.  In the dark I forget to remember them.

It does not take much to keep me but if there is one thing that I miss, it is having a workspace. Upon this workspace I could order my disorderly papers and if would offer me the comfort to read and write as I please.

I want my organised mess to spill over my desk- not the floor and cardboard boxes.

My room is a warehouse of stored ambition, discarded and or disused materials.  Writing, reading, coveted books and fading script, it holds the ghost of yesterday, last month and last year.

What I need is an eye for this storm, an epicentre for this quake of thoughts and hopes and plans.

The Empty Pages

12/01/14

I leaf through the pages of my notebook rediscovering snippets and smithereens of unfinished or scratched writing.  There are pages with multiple incomplete entries; stories, poems, observations and quotes both classical and modern.  The first block of pages are filled perhaps with a tenuous link, thought or theme.  This runs dry and the white swells until it engulfs the page.
The white page stares blankly at the pen.
Flick forward and it becomes apparent this is a pincer attack-the back of the book is also filled with an eclectic mix of writing.

Sometimes there is an obvious discrepancy to warrant this meandering.  A story starts at the back and movies forward to prevent it being interrupted or butchered by the random influx of ideas and sentiments charging from the front to the back.  The information at the back is sometimes more relevant to daily experience or current circumstances; e-mail addresses, letter drafts but even these are sometimes littered with forceful digression bursting into my thoughts.

Every notebook I have starts at the front or back, drifts to the other end and starts the push towards the middle.  What will be the last printed piece?  A random thought or observation or something more precise like an address or directions?
I cannot say.
I drift on to a new notebook.  All of them unfinished but with their middle pages burning white, their outer edges daubed in black and blue-the depressions of mind and soul upon the paper.  I sometimes feel a pang of guilt looking at these unfinished notebooks.  Such a waste of paper, surely?

Perhaps my mind fills in the ditches, building walls to keep me in the middle.  The straight and narrow narrowing.  Although I am worried when and if I extinguish the white light of those empty pages I will never need to pick up that book again and thus I forget.  I forget the things I have written and how I felt, along with ideas good and bad.  It is a diary of sorts and it spans many moons.  The very book I write this entry  in carries a stamp from 2011 to 2014 and still has pages to spare.
This story is not over yet.