Every September I want to buy a notebook and become a different person.
It comes on around the first week, when the light starts to change and the air gets that edge to it, and some part of me that hasn't been in a classroom for twenty years stands up and announces it's time for fresh stationery and a clean start. I don't have school. I haven't had school in a very long time. The body remembers anyway. September arrives and I get the powerful urge to organise my life, and the urge always takes the same form, which is wanting to buy things to put the organisation in.
A new notebook, obviously. The good kind, with a cover that feels like something and paper that takes ink without bleeding. A planner, maybe, with the hours of the day ruled out, so I could finally become a person who assigns the hours to tasks instead of letting them dribble away. New pens. A system. This September it was very nearly a particular planner I'd seen, the kind with a section for goals and a section for gratitude and a little box for the day's main intention, and I stood in the shop holding it and could see, vividly, the organised woman who would fill it in.
I know her. She's related to the Caro-reader and the woman who forages. She lives in the same drawer as the silk blouse. She's the version of me that all the nice unused things get bought for, and she never quite turns up.
I put the planner back. Partly because I already keep a list by hand every morning and it works precisely because it's nothing, a torn-off page with edges, no section for gratitude, no box for my intention. Add the boxes and I'd start performing for them, the way I can't keep a journal without performing for the future reader who wants to know how I felt. The planner would last nine days. I've done this enough times to know the number is roughly nine.
But I did buy one pen, because a person has to meet the season somewhere, and a single good pen is a smaller lie than a whole planner. I'm writing the morning list with it now. The list still says the same dull things it always said. The pen has not made me organised. It writes very nicely, though, and that turns out to be enough to have settled the September itch for another year.