I used to have this small dream about owning a jar, and in that jar I'd drop in scraps of paper with words scribbled on them. Some dream, huh? A jar of words. Later on I realized that it would be quite a hassle to carry a jar around with me everywhere I went, so I dug out a plain black unlined notebook, and that became my jar of words.
My friends like opening that notebook and taking a peep into my mess of a mind. They probably like seeing what kind of words I write down that inspire me, and maybe they are surprised about what they find. I know because I see their eyes widen, eyebrows raise, and the corners of their mouths lift when they read what I've written. I know because I react the same way. I love flipping through the notebook and remembering the story behind each word, each phrase, each sentence. Nothing's finished. Everything is still under construction.
There's an empty page in the notebook that I left empty on purpose. I remember starting a poem, frowning at it, then erasing it. I regret erasing that poem because I could've just left it, came back, and made it into something beautiful. I could have used it to learn and draw ideas from. Now it's an almost empty page with an almost poem that I've almost given up on figuring out. But I'm still trying to stitch the faint words together. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the first line goes, "the waves crashed."
When my grandmother died, I scribbled down two ugly poems spilling with raw emotion and stuck it inside that notebook. Those poems shouldn't even be considered literature, but they belong in that notebook with the perfect poems and unfinished stories. There are parts of my life that I wish weren't a part of me, but that's all they are. Parts. And I'm an unfinished poem, an unfinished story, an unfinished song part of an unfinished notebook that's still being written in. And I'm okay with that because the one who holds the pen is the most perfect author in the universe, and He isn't finished with my story just yet.
