I keep a notebook that's for nothing.
Not a journal. I've tried journals, and I always end up performing for some imagined future reader who wants to know how I felt about things, and I get bored of her by the second week. This isn't that. This is a plain hardback with no dates and no system, into which I copy whatever I don't want to lose and can't think of a use for.
Let me tell you what's in it, roughly.
A soup ratio, written down once and then ignored, because I make the soup by feel and the ratio just sits there as evidence that I once meant to be precise about it.
The word gloaming, with nothing next to it. I think I just wanted to own it for a second.
A sentence I overheard on the bus, from a woman talking to a friend: "I'm not tired, I'm just finished with it." I don't know what she was finished with. I think about it more than I think about most things people have said to me directly.
And a line I copied without noting the source, so I've genuinely lost track of whether I read it somewhere or made it up. Most days don't bother to announce themselves. It might be mine. It might belong to someone better. The notebook has quietly erased the difference, which feels about right.
There's no index. I never reread it on purpose. Every few months I open it by accident, looking for something else, and find a version of myself I'd forgotten, in her handwriting, having copied out the word gloaming for reasons she didn't explain to me and I can no longer ask her about.
The uselessness is the whole reason it's survived. The minute a notebook acquires a purpose I start failing to live up to it. This one asks nothing of me. So I keep it.