Yesterday, I finished the Moleskine I’ve had for the past three years. I picked it up in late May of 2007 at Spoonbill and Sugartown on Bedford Avenue a few days after I moved into my first-ever Brooklyn apartment. I went to the cafe next door and wrote one of my favorite quotes on the first page: “Who wields a poem huger than the grave?” Then, I turned the page and scribbled down a few story ideas, one of which ended up becoming the novel. I started writing just days later. The notebook is a hell of a history of the last three years of my life - thoughts, travel, love, daily life and, of course, many first drafts of passages that ended up in the manuscript. I get viscerally sentimental when I look through it.
Today, I walked over to Barnes & Noble and bought a fresh, clean, new Moleskine. I shudder a little thinking about the apropos timing of the metaphor: turning to a fresh page and rebuilding in a different book. Almost three years to the day, everything seems to be changing at once. The manuscript’s done and the queries are heading out. I have an editorial job I’ve been working years to get. I’m signing a lease on a new apartment that’s my own. I even have my reading for my first fiction publication tomorrow.
Funny how little sign posts jolt your heart to attention, signifying big, real things. As a writer, as a New Yorker, as a woman really making her way through the world.
M
