Writing Under the Stain

in an angst- saturated moment i find you there in my travel bag, injured by the neglect of a poorly screwed-on sparkling water bottle cap: my beloved poetry notebook of fifteen years. You are now one-third soaked and stained at the top. I shudder to think of throwing you away or burying you in the cemetery of old college diaries and love letters. You were my faithful collector of anxiety and pleasure, cleverness and drought, loneliness and victory; oftentimes tucked away for months at a time as creative energies were diverted to other outlets. Like a loyal dog whose master travels away, you never gave up on me. How many times the tears stained your inky pages long before I even knew that sparkling water was a thing! When friends moved away, or betrayed me (how i wished THEY would move away), when loved ones died too young, or old ones lived too long (how they wished THEY could die instead), when my son was slaying dragons and my daughter was breaking up with an inattentive boyfriend; when my wife struggled with her sisters, or when I agonized through physical therapy or cancer surgery, you were patiently there for me. Even as my joints and stitches eventually healed, you continue to be my invaluable companion, both for my history you contain to the left, and for the blank, hope-filled pages to the right. Like me, you are aging, stained, lumpy, scarred, but two-thirds useful as i write under the stain. ///NOTE: the shape above roughly mirrors the unstained portion of my notebook, which I will continue to use in its deformed and lumpy new state! Also, no poems were harmed in the making of this poem. I write in pencil, so the water didn't render any previous pages unreadable, thankfully!///