As a writer I have tones of notebooks, all filled with different sketches and small descriptions of future characters. Almost all of them have the first thirty pages neatly written with a perfect handwriting, which sometimes I don’t even recognize as my own, but after those thirty pages, everything becomes chaotic and strange looking, which is why I immediately want to change the notebook and get a new one.
Because I am a control freak sometimes, especially in this area, I cannot start a new notebook until I have finished writing all the pages on the one already in my hands. Now, I have too many projects to handle, so they each get a special notebook and a special place in my bag, house, shelves and so on, each waiting for their turn to be used, but as I was organizing them today I realized I don’t have one in which I can write my ideas like I used to. I used to see a face among the people I would pass on the street and stop on the first rock I could find writing down story ideas that came from that particular face. A couple of days ago I found a leather covered notebook, with very old sewed together pages, which I got as a present almost a year ago and I never touched since. I remember thinking then, that this would be the perfect thing to have in my purse when I will know exactly what I want to write about, because in my head it was to perfect to be ruined or stained with ink for nothing. So today I took it out of the shelf and put it on my purse, determined to give it a name and not waste it like the others; well they weren’t a waste content wise, but visual wise.
While I was waiting for my coffee date to come, I sat down on the stairs of the fountain from Piazza Santo Spirito and thought about a perfect name to give it. And after five minutes and three cigarette drags, three words winked at me from inside: fear, beginning, laughter. These words are the path and also the pattern; they are the road that takes each of us on any of our journeys and because of that they will guide me on my next personal journey, witnessing all the new stories whether they will be about random faces on the street, or about the deepest fear that could haunt me one day.
