Last weekend I was cleaning out a closet and found a notebook from 2017.
It was one of those black Moleskines with the elastic band. I remember buying it at an airport. The pages were curled at the edges. I'd shoved it in a backpack for years and the spine was cracked.
I sat down and flipped through it.
There was a camping trip I'd completely forgotten about. A startup idea scrawled across two pages with a diagram that must have made sense at 2 AM. A friend's phone number I didn't recognize anymore. A shopping list. The name of a restaurant I wanted to try.
Reading it felt like time travel. I wasn't just reading words — I was back there. I remembered the coffee shop where I wrote that startup idea. I remembered the rain on that camping trip. The notebook didn't just store information. It stored context.
