The Notepad By The Shelf

There’s a spiral notepad wedged between two board game boxes on the middle shelf, cheap, the kind you’d buy a stack of for a dollar at the drugstore, and it has every game I’ve played since early last year written in it, date, who I played with, one line about how it went. Same idea for books on the facing page, just title and the date I finished it. No ratings in the notebook itself, no star system, that all happens later when I actually sit down to write something up.

I started it because I kept having the exact same conversation with myself, staring at a game on the shelf trying to remember if I’d actually played it recently or if I was thinking of a different session entirely, whether I liked it the first time or the second, which detail belonged to which playthrough. Books were worse. I’d get halfway into a chapter with that creeping feeling I’d read this before, flip back, and sometimes I had and sometimes I hadn’t and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which without checking somewhere.

The notepad itself is nothing to look at. Half the entries are one word longer than useless, “fine,” “long,” “Deacon won,” and I don’t go back and clean it up or transcribe it anywhere nicer. That’s kind of the point. It’s not a project, it’s not for anyone else, it exists purely so future me doesn’t have to reconstruct the last six months from memory every time I want to write an actual review. When I sit down to put a game or a book into words properly, the notepad’s already done the hard part, told me the when and the who, so I can spend my actual writing time on the what and the why instead.

It’s a strange kind of relief, having a place that just holds the facts without asking anything else of them. My actual reviews get opinionated, sometimes more than I mean them to, and I’ll go back and forth on a rating right up until I hit publish. The notepad never argues with me. It just says what happened, in whatever order it happened, in handwriting that gets worse the later in the evening I’m writing.

I’ve gone through two of these now, the first one full, sitting in a drawer somewhere I should probably dig out. I like that they’re accumulating. Not for nostalgia exactly, more that it’s proof, some physical evidence that I actually did all this instead of it dissolving the way most ordinary weeks do once enough time passes.