Things I write down and never use

Every notebook a writer keeps is mostly a graveyard. Mine is no exception. It is full of things I noticed once, wrote down because they caught on something, and then never used. A story took a different turn, or the detail refused to grow, and there they sit. Here is a page of them, given a day out in the air.

The tide table pinned inside the door of a chip shop, four summers out of date, and still, I noticed, consulted.

A woman on the last ferry who counted the other passengers under her breath, twice, moving her lips, and then sat back as though something had been settled.

The particular way certain guest houses leave a single light burning in an upstairs window all night. The place never looks empty, and never quite looks lived in either.

A sign on a coast road that had once said something longer and now, after a few winters, said only BEWARE, the rest of it gone to weather. Beware of what, nobody had thought to repaint.

The man at the end of the pier who fished every evening and, as far as I ever saw, never once baited a hook.

A front door, in a terrace of identical front doors, painted the exact green of all the others, except that someone had at some point painted over the letter box and never cut it open again.

A café that changed hands over the winter and reopened with everything the same, the same tables, the same menu, the same faded photograph by the till, and somehow felt entirely unfamiliar.

The sound a small town makes at four in the afternoon in the last week of the season, which is the sound of doors being locked for a long time rather than a short one.

Two chairs left out on a balcony through an entire winter, angled towards each other, filling slowly with rain.

None of these became anything. That is the point of writing them down. A story wants a shape, and most of what we notice has no shape, only a pull. The tide table means nothing. The uncut letter box means nothing. But I wrote them down because for a second each of them made the ordinary world feel as though it were keeping something back, and that feeling, not the detail, is the thing I am actually in the business of.

The notebook fills faster than the books do. It always has. I used to think this meant I was wasting the noticings, hoarding them like a magpie with no nest to show for it. I think now that the noticing is the work, and the story is only what happens on the rare day when one of these small wrong things finally agrees to grow.

Most of them never will. They will stay on the page, angled towards each other, filling slowly with rain, waiting for someone to sit back down in them.