The notebook was green once, but the coffee had turned the cover the color of a dead leaf. I pulled the rubber band off and it snapped against my wrist. Everyone else in the compartment had folded themselves into sleep, coats over their faces, shoes still on. The pen was cold from the spiral wire and left a small dent in my index finger when I uncapped it.
The chair had made a sound like a dog's bark cut in half, just that one scrape when the waiter pulled it out for the woman ahead of me - and I wrote that down first. His apron was the yellow of old newspaper, not the yellow anyone would call yellow, and there was a stain near the pocket shaped roughly like Finland. The condensation on my water glass moved in one slow finger down the side and pooled on the paper coaster until the coaster gave and stuck to the glass bottom. I wrote: *coaster surrenders. * Nobody would ever see that sentence and I wrote it anyway, or maybe because.
The phone screen made a white rectangle on the ceiling and I typed: *having the most incredible time, the food alone is worth it. * The notebook was open beside my knee - the pen uncapped, and the sentence that started *I think I came here to disappear from something* ran off the ruled line a little where my hand had gone faster than I meant it to. The bunk above me creaked once - someone turning over - and I waited for it to stop before I kept typing. *Wish you were here,* I wrote, and then deleted it, because that was the one part that was true.
The Notebook That Nobody Asked About
The bench was metal and had someone's initials scratched into it with what must have been a key - deep enough that I could press my thumbnail into the groove. The departure board flipped over once and then stopped, one destination hanging there in orange letters I didn't recognize, and didn't need to. The pen gave out on a word I now can't reconstruct - something about the smell of the track, diesel and something sweeter underneath - and a man in a vest with a logo I couldn't read handed me a pencil without my asking, the eraser worn down to its metal collar. I wrote smaller to make it last - and somewhere in the third page the handwriting stopped looking like mine. On the fourth page I wrote the name of the thing I had actually gone there to stop thinking about, in letters so small I had to hold the paper up to a platform light to read it back.
The notebook had been in the bottom of the canvas bag with a broken zipper pull, and I found it when I was looking for a charger. I read the disappearing sentence twice, standing at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold beside the sugar bowl. The handwriting tilted left in a way mine doesn't, or doesn't anymore - and I turned the notebook face-down on the placemat with the rooster on it and walked to the window and stood there looking at the neighbor's car. The car hadn't moved in three days. I went back twice, each time touching the cover without lifting it, and then I put it in the drawer with the dead batteries.
The coffee warp had made the cover bow slightly in the middle, and when I pressed it flat against my palm it pushed back, like something with an opinion. The moving box was on the floor between the radiator and the window - half-full of the things I had decided were still me, and I set the notebook on top without looking inside it. A postcard from the same trip was on the windowsill - the good cathedral, the one everybody photographs - and I put that in the recycling bin without stopping to read what I'd written on the back. The notebook went in the box. I folded the flaps over and wrote *keep* in marker, pressing hard enough that the word went through to the cardboard on the other side.
The Sentence That Stayed
The box came out of storage two moves later, the *keep* marker faded to gray - and when I cut the tape the notebook was on top where I'd left it, under a birthday card from someone whose handwriting I no longer recognized. I picked it up and the coffee warp was gone - the cover had pressed itself flat against the years - and I stood there a moment with both palms around it the way you'd hold something warm. The pencil writing on the fourth page had gone lighter still, and I had to angle it toward the window to find the small letters, the name I'd written, which wasn't the city's name. Somewhere in the moving I had stopped carrying the reason I'd gone - the way a stone loses its wet color when it dries on the sill, and there it was, still wet. I sat down on the floor between the unpacked boxes and didn't read any more of it; I just held the spine against my sternum and waited for the radiator to find its knock.
The notebook went back in the box and the box went to the closet shelf above the winter coats, and for a while that was enough. Then last March I found the pencil - not my pencil, the man's pencil - the one with the metal collar where the eraser had been - wedged into the spiral at the top of the notebook where I must have tucked it on the platform without thinking. I held it between two fingers and the graphite was worn to a slant from my own grip, or from someone else's, and I couldn't tell anymore which was which. There was a word half-started at the tip, still there, grey and soft - and I pressed it once against the back of my hand the way you'd test a bruise, and the word came off on my skin in a smear I couldn't read.
The pencil went into the drawer too, next to the dead batteries and the notebook, and for a few weeks I kept opening the drawer for other things and finding it there, the metal collar catching the light. My daughter picked it up once while she was looking for a pen - held it for a second, and set it back down without using it, the way children sense when something isn't theirs. She asked where I'd gotten it and I said *someone gave it to me* and she said *who* and I said *I don't know* and both of those things were true. Later I found her at the kitchen table with a crayon, drawing a train.
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