#adding it to my collection of doodle post its in my secret drawer

[qingxin-dream]

welcome back to part 2 of “there’s nothing to do at work so i obsessively sketch wanderer” :)

[pollylynn]

Title: Hoard WC: 1200

She has a secret stash. It’s really kind of stupid. No, not kind of. It’s very stupid, but she has a secret stash of his handwriting. 

It sits in a tiny afterthought of a drawer in her desk at home. A small drawer. It sits a few steps from the shuttered window that’s home to her make-shift murder board, though why that distance—that proximity of one thing to another—has anything to do with anything isn’t something she really cares to contemplate. 

Not that she cares to contemplate her stash at all, but sometimes she does. Sometimes she contemplates it so long and so thoroughly that she ends up denying it’s a stash. She tells herself it’s just odds and ends that have found their way into her pockets and from there into the desk to be dealt with later. 

Sometimes she tells herself that it is later, it’s past time to deal with them. She makes up her mind to do it. She finds herself on an organizational tear and she jerks the little drawer open. She plucks out the first thing that comes to hand and moves to pitch it into the trash. That’s what she means to do, but she never does. She smooths it out, whatever it is. She unfolds, unrolls, disassembles whatever it is and pores over it. She drinks in the stroke, the flourish, the emphatic dot and dash, then returns it to the drawer, which she closes carefully. 

She has a secret stash. 

It’s not everything he writes, God no. She’d be an episode of Hoarders if she pocketed everything he writes. It’s odds and ends. 

It’s his signature, sometimes, or his initials, in their various configurations: RC, REC, RR, RAR, more recently.  She has two or three or six of those in precise rectangles with exacto-knife edges where she’s sliced them out of cards for her birthday, for Halloween, for the Chinese Moon Festival and a handful of things she’s pretty sure he’s made up. 

Sometimes it’s three-dollar words he idly scrawls in the margins of her legal pads, on the back of envelopes, on an active file folder once, and she yelled at him for a solid three minutes, then breathed a sigh of relief and quickly and quietly deployed her scissors to harvest the single word skeuomorph while he trotted off, tail between his legs to bring her conciliatory coffee. 

Sometimes it’s little more than a doodle with a few scrawled letters in the mix. She has a half-assed sailboat that she likes because he’s christened her the HMS Kate. It’s tucked into the little drawer alongside a delicate crescent moon with the word waning nestled in its curve. 

 She has receipts and envelope flaps. She has post-its and index cards. She has a chewing gum wrapper he’d pressed into her hand one giddy night when the whole team, Montgomery included, worked through dinner. She can’t even read whatever he’d scrawled on the inside. She can’t make sense of it, but she likes the slant of the letters and the incongruity of his fancy fountain pen stuttering over its wrinkled surface. 

She has little things—odds and ends that fit easily into a small wooden drawer. Odds and ends that she can make short work of with a few sweeps of her palm and a trash can on hand. That’s all she’s had since . . . whenever this stupid compulsion started. 

But now she has the list. 

He’s only just gone. It’s late and she feels worn out with the pleasant effort of weathering his enthusiasm. She feels worn out with thinking through her mom’s life out loud and watching her words soak into the page as his hand and his fancy fountain pen moved quickly, boldly across it. 

He’s only just gone, and there was something curious in the way he folded the list in thirds as if to return it to the inside pocket of his jacket, then thought better of it. There was something knowing in the purposeful way he reached for her hand to turn it palm up and lay the folded sheet there with a flourish. 

For safekeeping, he’d said with a searching, solemn smile before he moved quickly for the door where they’d lingered. They’d taken their time saying goodnight, thank you again, my pleasure.

And now she has the list, ad it’s too large, by far, her tiny afterthought of a drawer, and yet it belongs with the others. It belongs with the doodles and the card stock and the idly scrawled three-dollar words that she forgets as as soon as she looks them up. It’s a thing unto itself, that list. It’s a sweet, monumental, breathtaking-in-the-absolutely-literal-sense gesture. But it’s also his handwriting. 

She carries it to the desk. she pulls open the tiny drawer and empties it piece by piece on to the desk itself. It’s a tidy pile to say the least, and she’s worn out enough to wonder how these irregular scraps of things could possibly have been contained in so minute a space. She’s worn out enough to wonder how they can possibly be contained at all. 

But they must be. They have to be. 

She goes to the bedroom next. There’s an odd hat box thing on her dresser that had once contained a terrible, forgotten gift from some miscellaneous relative. She has no idea why she even kept it, especially when she’s pretty sure the gift itself found its way into someone else’s hands almost immediately. It’s a round white wire frame with something like tulle stretched over it. It has a matching lid topped with a frilly bow that she tears off, first thing and tosses into the trash. 

She empties the mishmash of items that have found their way into the box out on to the dresser. There’s change and mismatched earrings and a sticky, half-unwrapped cough drop. There’s a foreign coin she doesn’t remember having and a handful of hair ties. She leaves the collection of junk out on the dresser. She’ll deal with it later. 

She tucks the box with its remodeled lid under her arm. She moves with purpose back to the desk and gathers everything up, piece by piece. She sorts as she goes. She clips the signatures—the initials—together. She finds a stray glassine envelope and stores her trove of exotic words. She folds remnants of their arguments together. She lays the list in with it all and taps the lid into place. 

She rolls back in the desk chair and regards the box. It takes up most of the desk’s available surface area. It can’t live there. She swivels to the shuttered windows. Her heart stutters sideways as she wonders for a minute if the damned thing would actually fit on the sill. It won’t, though. It won’t. 

It will fit on the bottom of the wooden cube plant stand underneath though. It fits there exactly, so that’s where she puts it, not even a few steps from her make-shift murder board now. 

She has a secret stash of his handwriting. It’s really kind of stupid. 

A/N: Pretty bad day. Got a late start on this one, and it feels pretty rickety. Sorry about that. Hmmm. 

images via homeofthenutty