The Notebook

The first thing Vincent does every morning is check that the notebook is still there.

It sits on the left side of his desk, black cover worn soft at the corners, pages swollen with ink and humidity from the Springfield summer. He does not open it right away. He makes coffee first — black, two cups, the second one he forgets about — and stands at the window watching State Street come alive. The early shift workers moving with the particular efficiency of people who have been awake for hours already. The woman who walks her dog at the same time every morning and never looks up from her phone. A delivery truck double-parked in front of the corner store, the driver moving boxes with a rhythm that suggests he has done this particular route a thousand times and expects to do it a thousand more.

The city doing what the city does. Running its quiet engine. Indifferent.

Then he sits down.

Then he opens the notebook.

It is July 2023. He is twenty-six years old and he has been doing this for eleven years — the morning ritual, the desk, the notebook, the specific quality of attention he brings to the first hour of the day before the world has a chance to make demands on it — and it has not gotten easier or harder. It has just become the shape of his days. The thing that organizes everything else around it. The thing that was there before any of the achievements and will be there after all of them, the constant against which everything else is measured.

His apartment is on the second floor of a building on a block that is not the worst block in Springfield and not the best. He has lived here for three years, which is the longest he has stayed anywhere since leaving Holyoke. He has painted two of the walls a dark gray that he chose because it matched the inside of his head on the days he needed the room to understand what he was carrying. The landlord has never commented on the paint. The landlord is a man of few words and fewer questions, which is part of why Vincent renewed the lease without looking at other options.

He has two cats. Ghost, who is gray and enormous and sleeps like he is trying to disappear into the furniture — a different piece each day, as if rotating through options to find the one that most completely absorbs him. And Omen, who is small and black and watches everything with the quiet attention of someone collecting information for a purpose they have not yet revealed. Ghost came from the shelter in 2020, on a rainy Wednesday, walked directly over to Vincent and sat on his feet and made the decision for both of them. Omen came six months later, appeared at the shelter with no history on file, and looked at Vincent through the cage bars with an expression of someone who has been expecting this meeting and is mildly irritated by how long it took.

He has a desk he found on the street and sanded down over three weekends. He has three bookshelves, all full, with a fourth row of books stacked horizontally on top of the third row because he ran out of vertical space two years ago and has not yet decided what to do about this. He has a coffee maker that is older than his publishing career and a kettle that is newer and a French press he uses on weekends when he

has time to be intentional about coffee instead of just needing it.

He has, on the wall above the desk, a single index card with five words written on it in his own handwriting:

Where words outlive the wound.

He wrote that line two years ago at 2 AM on a night he does not talk about, reached for something to write on, found an index card in the desk drawer, wrote the line before he fully understood it. He read it back in the morning and taped it to the wall. He has not found a better line since. He does not expect to. Some lines are done.

The notebook in front of him is the current one — he is on page 114 of 200, which means he is past the halfway mark and the pages are starting to have the specific give of a notebook that has been used, that has absorbed the pressure of the pen and the humidity of the room and the time it takes to fill it. He has finished forty-three notebooks since he was fifteen. He keeps them all in a box in the closet, each one dated on the spine in black marker, the dates going back to 2012. If his apartment caught fire the notebooks are the thing he would go back for. Not the laptop. Not the external

hard drive with his manuscripts and his tax documents and eleven years of photographs. The notebooks.

He uncaps the pen — a specific pen, a Pilot G2 0.7, the only pen he writes first drafts with, which he buys in a twelve-pack and keeps in the left desk drawer — and he writes the date at the top of the page. July. He writes it the way he always writes it: matter-of-factly, as if documenting something for the record. Which he is. He has always understood his writing as a kind of documentation. A legal brief. A deposition. Evidence filed by the body against everything that happened to it, every exhibit preserved in chronological order.

He writes: He is still here. That is not a small thing.

He reads it back. He leaves it.

He drinks the first cup of coffee.

He begins.

* * *

He was fifteen the first time he wrote something that felt true.

Not a poem, exactly — he would not have called it that, did not have the framework for it yet. More like a pressure release. He was sitting

on the floor of his bedroom in Holyoke with the door shut and the wall behind him and his knees drawn up, the composition notebook on his thighs. The house was loud in the way it was always loud — not necessarily angry loud, just full. Full of voices and television and the particular density of people living in close quarters without enough room for all the things they were carrying.

He had the notebook because he had needed something to do with his hands during a week that had required all of his available composure to get through, and the notebook was the closest thing. He wrote what was in his chest, which at the time he could not have named or categorized, only felt as a specific pressure that needed to go somewhere.

He wrote: the walls know my name.

He crossed it out. He wrote it again. He left it.

He did not know what a poem was, technically. He knew what it felt like to have something in his body that had nowhere to go, and he knew that when the words came out the thing in his body got smaller. Not gone. Just smaller. The way a room gets smaller when you turn on the light — not the room actually

changing, just the darkness retreating to the corners.

He filled that notebook in three weeks. He wrote on the bus. He wrote between classes in margins of notebooks that were supposed to be for other things. He wrote at night with the lamp on low, the door shut, the house loud outside his room and him inside it with the pen and the page and the specific relief of translation.

He did not show it to anyone.

He bought another notebook — the black- and-white marbled kind, composition style, 200 pages — with his birthday money. He kept it in his backpack under his gym clothes where no one looked. The writing was not good. He knows this now, looking back at those early notebooks, the Holyoke ones he still has in the box in the closet. The handwriting is small and pressed hard and the sentences run long and the metaphors are the metaphors of a fifteen-year- old who has read a fair amount but has not yet developed the judgment to know when a metaphor has stopped working.

But it was honest. It was the most honest thing he had ever produced. That counted for something. That counted for everything.

* * *

His English teacher, Mrs. Correia, read one of his pieces in class.

He had not meant to turn it in. He had grabbed the wrong notebook — the school one and the personal one were both black-and-white marbled, a failure of system design he corrected immediately after — and turned in a page of his actual writing instead of the assignment on Of Mice and Men that everyone else had written. He realized the mistake the moment Mrs. Correia collected the papers and he watched her take his. He sat through the rest of the class in a specific kind of dread that was different from the dread he usually carried.

Mrs. Correia did not return the papers that day.

She returned them the next morning. She walked up and down the rows, handing them back, and when she got to Vincent she paused. She put his paper face-down on his desk and rested her hand on it for a second — just a second — and then moved on.

He waited until everyone else was looking at their papers to turn his over.

She had written in the margin in her small precise handwriting: This is real. Keep writing.

He looked up. She was at the front of the room looking at him. He nodded. She nodded back.

He went home that night and wrote about that nod for four pages.

* * *

Now it is eleven years later and he is sitting at the desk in Springfield and the coffee is going cold and the city is loud outside and the notebook is open.

He writes: The page does not flinch. The page does not leave. The page holds everything exactly the way he gives it — raw, honest, without apology.

He reads it back. He adds a line: This is why he keeps coming back. Not because the page saves him. Because the page witnesses.

He drinks the second cup of coffee, which is cold now. He does not heat it up. He has learned to drink cold coffee without minding it, which is either a form of discipline or a form of resignation and he has decided not to investigate which.

He opens the laptop.

He starts the day.

* * *

He thinks about time differently than most people he knows.

Most people experience time as a line — past behind them, future ahead, present where they are standing. He experiences it more like a room with many doors. The present is the center. The past is not behind him but around him, in the walls, accessible through the doors. Some doors are open. Some are closed. Some have locks he has not yet figured out.

He thinks about this on a Thursday evening in August, sitting at the desk with the notebook open and the pen in his hand and the city outside doing what the city does in August, which is mostly just being hot and loud and specific. He thinks: the writing is how I navigate the room. The writing is how he finds the right door, opens it carefully, stands in the doorway and looks at what is inside without being pulled all the way in.

He has learned the difference between accessing the past and being consumed by it. The difference is the pen. The pen gives him something to hold in the doorway. The pen says: you can look, and you can write what you see, and then you can close the door and come back

to the center, where the coffee is and the cats are and the city is outside being August.

He writes this down. He writes: The past is not behind him. It is in the walls. The writing is how he finds the doors.

He reads it back. He thinks it is approximately true. He keeps it.

* * *

He reads every night before he sleeps.

This is a practice he developed in Portland — in the quiet months, the three months of deliberate aloneness, when he had stripped away most of the noise and what was left was the work and the reading and the walking and the specific discipline of being alone with himself. He discovered in Portland that reading before sleep did something that nothing else did: it moved him into someone else’s narrative, someone else’s set of concerns, and let his own recede for the hour before unconsciousness. The nightmares were less frequent in Portland. He has not been able to fully explain this.

He reads widely. Fiction and poetry and essay and the neuroscience of trauma that he has been accumulating for four years. He reads writers he loves and writers he is learning from

and writers he does not like but reads anyway because understanding what does not work is as important as understanding what does.

He keeps a separate notebook for reading notes — not a journal about his reading, not a summary, just the lines that stop him. The lines he needs to write down to finish understanding. He has been doing this for eight years and has four reading notebooks, which live on the shelf beside the archive box rather than inside it because they are different in kind — not his words, but his response to others’ words, which is a different category of evidence.

He is currently reading three books simultaneously, which is his normal operating mode. A novel by a writer he has been meaning to get to for years. A collection of essays about time and memory and how the brain constructs the past. A book of poems by a poet who is doing something with the line that he is trying to understand well enough to learn from without stealing.

He reads himself to sleep most nights.

On the nights when sleep does not follow the reading, he gets up and goes back to the desk.

The notebook opens.

He keeps at it.

* * *

His daily rhythm, in detail:

He wakes between 6 and 6:30, earlier on bad nights, sometimes as early as 4. The first act of the day — before coffee, before the notebook, before looking at his phone — is the physical inventory he developed after the pamphlet in the waiting room gave him the clinical framework for what his body was doing. He lies in bed and checks each part. Shoulders: held or released. Jaw: tight or loose. Chest: present or pressured. Hands: open or clenched.

He releases what is held. He notes what will not release. He gets up.

Coffee. Two cups. The first one while standing at the counter, which is the cup that is just function — the caffeine, the warmth, the signal to the body that the day has started. The second one he takes to the desk, where it sits beside the open notebook and usually goes cold because he forgets it once the writing starts.

The notebook. An hour minimum, sometimes two or three if the morning is good. He writes without reading what he has written until the hour is over. He has learned this from years of interrupting himself — the habit of reading back mid-session, which inevitably produces editing,

which interrupts the generation, which is the one thing the first hour should be entirely devoted to. Generation first. Everything else after.

Then: the laptop. The manuscript, which is his primary project, which takes up most of his working hours. He works on the manuscript for as long as it is going well and for a set minimum time when it is not. He has a minimum. He has kept the minimum even on the worst weeks, even in the long tails after the worst episodes. The minimum is the practice. The practice does not require the mood.

Then: the adjacent work. The WordVerse notes, the design work for Poe & Port, the social media that he treats not as a distraction but as a different mode of the same thing — communication, translation, reaching the people who need to be reached.

Then: reading. Evening, before sleep.

Then: sleep, or the attempt at sleep, or the 4 AM return to the desk, depending on the night.

This is the shape of his days. He has lived inside this shape for years. It is not rigid — the shape accommodates the bad weeks and the good ones, the episodes and the recoveries, the mornings that produce and the mornings that

only produce the sitting there. But the shape is constant. The shape is the practice. The shape is what he has.

* * *

He has a specific memory that returns often, not as a trigger but as orientation: the first time he read his own work to someone else.

He was sixteen. The someone else was not a classmate or a friend — he did not have the kind of friendships at sixteen that accommodated this kind of vulnerability. The someone else was his older cousin Dante, who was twenty-two and visiting from Worcester for a holiday weekend and who had a quality of attention that Vincent had always found different from other people’s attention. Dante listened fully. He did not multitask or drift. When you spoke to Dante you understood that your words were being received by someone who intended to keep them.

Vincent waited until the second evening. Until after dinner when the adults were in the living room and he and Dante were on the back porch with sodas and the specific quiet of a November night in Holyoke, the kind of cold that makes the stars look closer.

He said: I write poetry. I’ve been writing it for a year.

Dante said: can I hear some?

He read three pieces. He read them from the notebook, sitting on the back porch with the cold pressing in and his voice steady because he would not let it shake. He read the one about the walls and the one about the canal and the one he had written about this exact cousin on a summer day three years earlier, watching Dante fix a car engine with the specific patience of someone who has learned that some things only come apart correctly if you are gentle.

Dante listened.

When he finished, Dante said: you should keep doing this.

Not: these are good. Not: you have talent. Just: you should keep doing this. As if the continuation was the obvious conclusion, as if the only possible response to hearing these poems was to instruct their maker to continue.

He has kept doing this for eleven years.

He thinks about Dante on the back porch sometimes, when he needs to remember that the work has always been worth reading to someone. That the choice to share it rather than

keep it has always been the right choice. That someone has always said: keep doing this.

He is still keeping doing this.

He will keep doing this for the rest of his life.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. This is the practical meaning. Time is the real cost. Publishing pulls hours from writing. He has accepted this. Imperfectly. He would rather be at the desk. He is always rather-be-at-the-desk. But the work requires more than writing. He does what the work requires.

The pen comes up.

The pen moves.

He sits back and reads what is on the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. Not yet revision. Something earlier than that. Is it right? Is it true? Is it going where it has to go?

He reads it back. The afternoon is moving. The window light is different now. The body has been here a long time. He stands. Rolls his shoulders. Ghost lifts his head from the couch, considers, puts it back down. Vincent returns to the desk. He looks at what is on the page. The work outlasts the wound that made it. That is the whole point. The work continues. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

His hand finds the pen.

He puts down the next line.

The next line always comes.