The Martlet

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to lose my notebook on the ferry.

This was not an everyday notebook full of class notes or phone numbers, but my own personal notebook — the one with all of my essential memos, the daily “To Do” lists that never get done and the scribbles of erratic ideas that strike me throughout the day. In essence: my soul.

The odd thing about losing my soul, though, was that I didn’t even notice for the first couple of hours. There was no spontaneous combustion, bleeding from the ears, or even loss of consciousness — all of which would have made for a much better story.

Instead, I simply went on with my trip, passing by entertaining advertisements with slogans that escape me now and giggling at old ladies whose mannerisms I can no longer recall.

I started to get worried. What if the one story that would have rocketed me to fame and changed the face of humanity as we know it was just beginning to bud in a notebook that I will never see again?

There, on the ferry, I had simply abandoned my hopes at renown.

It wasn’t until after I had left the ship and had begun to actively eavesdrop on a couple of entertainingly drunk men riding the bus that it hit me: I had nowhere to scrawl ideas and idiotic quotations.

That’s right. I had nowhere to jot down the exact words of their discussion about whether they were drawn best in pencil or pen. Nowhere to make note of a friend’s proclamation that she had put her cat on anti-depressants. Nowhere to preserve this treasured observations for posterity.

Where was I supposed to get my inspiration now?

After all, a childhood of television had long since hobbled my imagination, so coming up with my own ideas was out of the question. What would I do? How would I cope?

In desperation, I called BC ferry’s Lost and Found to beg the lady on the other end to look for a small, ragged journal that contained my life.

From the way she said “Your life then, eh?” I could tell she had lost her eyebrows in her hairline and was wondering how two-dimensional my existence was that it could be restricted to a notebook.

How on earth was I supposed to describe the sort of chicken scratch that was so vital to my survival?

I almost pity the person that must have found my notebook full of scribbles, in which the only comprehensible statements were those about “reproductive abilities” or my developed dislike of dry humping in between mangled Spanish notes about calling my Mom. Or that I’m in need of alfalfa.

Who the fuck needs alfalfa and what does that even say about me?

Needless to say, it was left to the operator to tell me that no, my soul had not been recovered and, despite her kind words about a call back, the implication that I must be a pathetic, lonely being to put that much of myself into bound scraps of paper still stung.

There I was, left with a ten-by-twelve void in my heart, and I would have to get over it.

I would need to abandon my hopes of ever remembering the kooky words of the bus passenger on acid that evening, or the observations I would make the next day on accents and the scent of piss around East Hastings.

A shell of my former self, I picked up a little green book I had lying around and began to write about the commencement of a life without the memories of old ideas.

I tried to ignore the butch chick reading over my shoulder, leaving her to make sense of my scribbles about “never again seen souls” and “piss perfumed breezes.”