The Strangeness of Half-remembered Ideas

If someone ever steals my phone – or rummages through the ‘notes’ application – they would probably think that the owner is not all there; probably referring to “Earth”. I admit a lot of the time my mind is wandering off on its own somewhere, especially right before I drift off to sleep; which brings me back to the phone. Because I use it as an alarm clock (there’s nothing like a jig to get your mind up and running at 4:45am) it’s usually on top of the pile of books I am reading and the notebook I keep next to the bed. And I can type a note without having to turn the room’s light back on and waking the pets. As a result, my note entries are in a jumble of Afrikaans and English and look something like this: “cross map”, “Azah – naam”, “Storie ‘they came from the forest/wood’. In afr? Beide?Afr, tuin wat aangelê is ens sit by ander storie” – yeah, I’m still trying to remember what “other story” I meant at 12:30am, but it seemed logical at the time. I also sometimes forget that I had made a note.

Some notes are even the (proper) beginnings of stories:  I saw them when I went outside to feed the garden birds. It wasn’t normal. It hadn’t even rained. But there they stood, a whole cluster of them under the acacia. Toadstools. Acrid yellow smoke was curling from a tiny chimney protruding from the one in the centre. It had started. And it wasn’t even spring yet… Which meant that they could only be Winter Gnomes. Now, If only I could remember where I was going with this…