Written By Ruby Saggers
Associate Creative Writing Editor
Image via Unsplash by Samet Kurtkus
There are certain things staring at me, making me feel insignificant. So small. The things that I collect as I pull myself through another week – the receipts, the little orange vintage books, the oat milk stickers, the toilet paper stuck to a shoe, frantically waving my foot around to avoid the looks and the “HAH, she has toilet roll stuck to her!”
Somehow, a small accumulation of bits and bobs seem to me far more significant than I, myself, may be. Who on earth am I to say that my towering over these little things makes me significant, and worthy of throwing these things away? When I have done little more than write in my silly little books and ponder over the silly (though rather grand) issues in this silly little world, what more am I compared to that bit of toilet paper stuck to a shoe?
These bits and bobs scattered amongst some larger bits and bobs – a piteous, pretentious assortment of Nietzsche and Joyce and Chaucer and Twinings tea – are STARING AT ME. Why are they JUDGING ME. They are watching me crumble and pick myself back up and crumble once again. They are watching me grieve and worry and talk to myself as I am the only one that can make sense of it all – other than those stupid bits placed amongst my room as though I put them there to watch over me, make sure I’m living properly. They know me best. They have known me from the moment I picked them up. They most likely saw me coming, actually.
These little scraps of paper shoved inside my copy of Colm Tóibín know the words I am reading; the influence they have on me. Only these little scraps have the power to sit with these words in my battered, soggy copy longer than I do; as I place her down, droopy eyed, it is time for those scraps to bathe in the words I will inevitably ruminate on in my uninspiring sleep. And when I wake once again, whether I like it or not, I must listen to this silly little bit of paper tell me all about those words on the pages I gave up reading the night before.
Without that bit of paper, I lose my place in the story; without the receipts, I forget what day I am on, or what money I have thrown around thinking so hard about it that it is as though I never really thought at all. I could stick all of these in a pretty little notebook and you could read it and know everything there is to know about me. The titles of the books I buy, the concerning theme of grief and plague and profundity that consumes me, the recent photographs of a family with an aching gap between them, and the old photographs – the gap filled with a face we strive to keep familiar as the years mould an unbearable distance between us, the losses I have mourned and the gains I have fought for. I have found that without my accumulation of scraps and books and notes I am nothing more than a silly whirling bunch of atoms.
It seems material is the adhesive to my knowledge, my medley of thoughts and emotions that I would very easily lose sight of if I were to let them slip from the grasp of ink on paper.
[Meditations written on a receipt from my usual trip to the Fitzwilliam Museum – oh god, how pretentious am I]