Friday 13th, first message

NOTE

I am fond of post-its, sticky notes – snail glue papers. They stay in books to keep lines and pages. They scream ‘HERE!’ in the corporate monochromes of the library. I can keep them at face-height and encounter them like I would a person, only there’s something written on it, most often by me, which can even surprise me with myself.

So I do like sticky notes. Truth be told, you need a piece of paper and then only something very sticky to paste, against the headboard, in browns and dark reds. Beats chalk by inches.

Yet sticky notes are predisposed to announce autumn in their fall. Sometimes you’ll turn your back on them, and when you turn towards the whispers they’ll have fallen indiscriminately like so many little bodies. Blank sides up, revealing the too-solid wall. You can’t rely on a post-it note. They stick to the papers they like and censure your words before you can speak in protest. (I have to focus and remember the words because if I leave the note there’ll be the absence of a square note in my recollection.)

Sticky notes have a lot of personality. I use them for my self-portraits in fine-liner. Draw, write, and slap.

Little square notes are my form of thinking, it seems, and if one does not suffice I’ll just carefully separate another leaf from its minced-tree brethren. A5 is a picture postcard, better than its standard big brother. But even smaller and the language runs into poetry: ‘rescue stretch fabric’ – ‘kill this book’ – All those too flattering notes from me to me, which I read with surprise and a mounting sense of suspicion.

But I know my own handwriting. ‘this world is safe, that has you being you’ And never doubt it.