I went through my notes app, and, as you’d expect, it primarily consisted of long-forgotten shopping lists. Some had two or three items, and some had up to ten. Some were all checked off—others were not. Did I buy those items and forget to check them off or simply forget to buy them? I’ll never know.
Well, shopping lists aside, I found lists of recommendations: books, films, TV shows. Ace of Spades. Kingsman. High Potential. Things people told me about and I wrote down “to look at later.” Between you and me, when I want to take a recommendation, I will purchase it, or add it to my watch list, or bookmark the page within hours. The only notes that remain are those that were promptly forgotten.
I’ve deleted them now.
Closely following the recommendations (in terms of volume) were the random jotted notes. Usually about people. A name here, a university there. If I knew I’d forget and wanted to remember, I’d make a note of it in the most convenient place at hand: my phone. And both ironically and sensibly, it always worked. I recognized every one of these notes and only deleted them because I didn’t need them anymore. Despina? She’s the girl I met in Greece—we follow each other on Instagram now. Spurgeon’s College? My mum studied there. They were so obvious, it was laughable.
But more rarely, I wrote obscure things with little reference: foreign words, passwords, addresses, and website links. They were so poorly managed and scattered idly amongst the chaos that even dwelling on them didn’t jog my memory. A password is useless without a site name to go with it, and an address is useless if you don’t know who it’s for. 29 Thornhill Park. Καρραμεδογατα. 3838. I mean, half of it’s not even English.
Lastly, I found the treasures. A line or two of poetry. Entire senseless songs I’d made up. Wild story ideas. A few of these had travelled from phone to phone since my first pink Samsung at the age of 13, such as:
I ate an egg at Easter and now I feel sad / My mummy says that murder is what Jesus says is bad / It had little peanut organs and smooth butter blood / When I asked if I could eat it, my daddy said I could / Baby chickens are not food, my mummy told me so / So chocolate eggs are out of bounds / I swear that now I know.
Fun, right? Others were new to me—though I suppose at some point I’d written them…
“She was going to die in the morning and she said she would go to the cemetery to attend to the needs of the dead.”
A dream perhaps?
“This always happens. Things are always a little backwards.”
What was I going through?
I’ve labelled these two notes “no clue” and “no idea,” respectively. Because while they are complete nonsense, present me finds them quite entertaining. It is just as thrilling as it is frustrating to find notes I’ve forgotten.
Deborah Rose is the Managing Editor for Hey! Young Writer and assisted in starting this amazing blog but now spends most of her time helping our founder, Alee Anderson, with her ghostwriting business. She is the author of two middle-grade, fantasy novels and a fan of all things history related! You can follow her on Instagram at @deborahroseintheforest or visit her website, deborahrosegreen.co.uk to read more of her writing.
Featured image by Chad Madden on Unsplash.
