The empty beauty of Australian rainbows

When I’m meant to be going to sleep but not quite getting there (not quite? I miss it by miles) my mind goes off on the weirdest tangents: things which make perfect harmonious sense at the time but as soon as I wake up turn to so much illogical distractible fluff. Last night it was the future. What do I want to do with my life? It didn’t start there, though; oh no. It started here.

 

There’s a brand of notebook, of school diary, made by an Australian company – I had one in Year 9 – that have really nice covers. Some of them have road signs (Warning! Koalas ahead! – that’s what I had) and some of them have surf-like designs. There’s one that’s just got a rainbow cover, red through pink through orange through yellow through green through pale blue through indigo, and it has white designs creeping onto the cover. White designs that look like rose stems, and a white border.

 

That’s all I was thinking about. My head was full of this image of the diary cover. And then:

 

I wonder who designed that cover? I don’t suppose that whoever designed it had an epiphany; had a moment in their life when they realised their destiny; I don’t suppose thy ever went to speak to their careers advisor, sat down, said I want to design the fronts of notebooks in the colours of alternate rainbows – I will be the one who pioneers the white stem. That didn’t happen; they fell into it. I wonder if they’re disappointed at the way their life has turned out, making graphics for notebooks, but they oughtn’t to be, they’ve made me happy, those beautiful empty patterns make me see things the way they are. Maybe every notebook cover is just as beautiful and empty, when you see it the right way. Maybe that’s the secret. Not everyone has the mind to notice the beauty of the covers but I do.

 

Of course, this progressed quite naturally to:

 

When I’m older I’m going to design covers. I can’t make beautiful empty things in a city, so I’ll live in a hut on my own at the edge of the beach. It’ll be a cove, a tiny cove, and no one will know about it because it won’t exist for anyone except me, and I’ll live in the centre of a hollow web of fame drawing things with no centre at the edge of the water. It’ll always be sunset and the water will shine pink until the sand and – why not get up right now and draw a picture? Why not? Yeah, I’ll do that!

 

So this is what I drew (in the dark, feeling inspired):

 

 

That’s me in the window, drawing covers for diaries. I think I intended to leave them all piled up under my bed so that when I died the company would be guilt-forced into publishing them.

 

And then I let myself chill a little and I spent an hour or so thinking about that ‘hollow web of fame’, which I think was probably a reference to my wanting to live unnoticed like I’m not alive but not to be forgotten – so I think I meant I wanted to be famous but unaware of it – but I’m not that sure. That phrase sticks in my head, though. It sticks and it drills in and it demands that I keep it there but I don’t understand it.

 

So really, I guess, I just wanted to say that when you’re half-asleep, everything seems like the greatest idea you’ve ever had. And I also wanted to say that the Maths exam I just sat was seriously unfairly hard and I hope the calculator one has more areas that we’ve covered in it or I’m not gonna get me that A.

 

Happy Monday, everyone!