The First Paper I Ever Loved

On paper

In the planner post I mentioned the Poesiealbum and said it deserved its own post. So here it is. Except I have to start by admitting I don't have mine anymore.

It's somewhere at my mom's, probably. In a box, in a basement, in a country I don't live in. I know it's not gone the way things are truly gone. I just can't put my hands on it, which some days feels like the same thing.

If you didn't grow up in Germany, here's what it was.

A Poesiealbum was a little book you handed to your friends, and they wrote something inside and gave it back. A verse, a saying, a wish for your life. The right-hand page was for the words. The left-hand page was left blank on purpose, for the person to decorate. Drawings. Stickers. Those shiny die-cut scraps we called Glanzbilder that you'd trade and hoard.

This was mine from around nine to eleven, mid-eighties, before we all got too cool for it. By the time we were teenagers it was over. You don't hand a book around asking for feelings when you're fourteen. But for a couple of years there, it was the most important object I owned.

The closest American thing is a yearbook, and it isn't close. A yearbook gets you "have a cool summer" and a signature. This was different. This asked people to write something down and mean it.

Not everyone meant it, to be fair.

A lot of the entries were cheesy. There were standard verses that went around, the ones everybody copied because they were safe and rhymed and you didn't have to think. The German version of roses are red. You'd open to a page and know immediately that this person had phoned it in, and that was fine, that was most of them.

But then there were the other ones.

Every so often somebody actually stopped and wrote something to me. You could tell. The handwriting was slower. They'd thought about it. Those pages didn't rhyme as neatly and they meant infinitely more, and I think some part of my nine-year-old brain was already sorting the world into people who copy the safe verse and people who write the real one.

I could not tell you a single word from any of those pages now. That's the part that gets me. I remember that they existed. I remember the feeling of getting the book back and finding one. The actual words are gone.

Here's what I keep thinking about.

I have spent my whole adult life around paper. Notebooks, planners, zines, the whole thing. And the first paper I ever loved was a book whose entire purpose was to hold what other people thought of me, decorated by hand, passed around with no audience beyond the people in it.

Of course this is what I turned into. I was handed the template as a kid.

It wasn't content. Nobody performed it. It was the truest thing in my desk.

A Poesiealbum is everything I believe about paper now, before I had any of the words for it. It got cheesy and it got real and it got decorated badly, and it mattered more than anything else I owned.

So I'm going to text my mom and ask her to look.

Maybe it turns up. Maybe it's in a box she can actually find, and maybe I'll be looking at my own handwriting from age ten again, the way I looked at that seventh-grade diary, laughing at how much everything mattered.

And maybe it doesn't turn up, and this post is the only place it exists now. A description of a book I can't find, which is its own kind of Poesiealbum entry, I suppose. Somebody trying to write down something true before it's gone.

If you have yours, go find it. Right now, before it becomes a box at your mom's in a country you don't live in.

Take it from me.

Bianca.

I also make zines, stickers and printables under Noted., for people who like paper more than they can strictly justify.
notedperiod.com