It Was Written

Sitting on a stand-up cafe table at the boulanger just to the left of the information and travel kiosks at the Lausanne train station, next to an empty bottle of water, is a black journal with a Eurail train schedule, a few train tickets (including the one I needed for the ride to Paris), and inscriptions by all the people I've hung out with in the past six weeks. If you're passing through, please keep and eye out for it. A lot people drew fish in there, and I know they wouldn't want their time and effort squandered. There will be a reward.

I suppose there is a decent chance of recovery, because it is worthless to anybody but my theoretical stalkers and biographers. And me. I was pretty torn up about it. I forgot about it while reading the short story in this week's New Yorker. Then I remembered it and got upset again. Then I fell asleep, and upon waking had resigned it to the wasteland of lost and forgotten objects encoding information too esoteric to be deciphered or valued by anybody but their creators. Perhaps somebody will find it and read trough. They might marvel at the drawings, wonder how the author reconciled the Biblicality of the title (The Book of Matthew) with references (telling all in their illegibility) to a weekend in Amsterdam, or miss their train as I did not, sitting stunned, awed by the obvious genius that put it all together. And then maybe they'll overcome their inevitable desire to possess such a priceless work or art and mind, and contact me through one of the people who wrote in it. Because I want it back.

It wasn't finished.