Lost and Found: Stories

I have been attempting a clean up, a consolidation really, of all the notebooks I have scattered around my flat. It is amazing how many of them I have and how randomly I have used them. Although their covers announce a particular purpose, “Music I Want”, for example, I would find scribbled interviews for newspaper articles, phone numbers without names, ugly doodles, to-do lists, and free writes on their pages. I have long given up on keeping a proper journal, and in some ways, this blog is here for me to put some of those randomly collected snatches of thought, process, and boredom in one place.

I can still remember how to spell your name. I no longer transpose the R and the N, which for so long did not seem true. My hand, although knowing how, refused to set these two next to each other, like how my friends thought of us.

My father pedals casually along the busy, freshly laid road. We are riding precariously close to rattling old buses and speeding cars. All I can see of him is his extended arms, his ashy knuckles a row of blackened bumps along the handle bars. He breathes evenly and when he exhales there is the illusion of freshly pulled tree bark that flows past my cheek. He smells brown as I imagine brown to smell. Like the dirt that I pulled and tilled in our small backyard.