For the most part, the notebooks filled with decade old scribbles, collecting dust in the closet of my childhood bedroom, are illegible. What can be deciphered of my highschool years are angst fueled rambles, longings for places I had never been and listless poems for women who may or may not have existed.

I rarely noted a time or a place, so there is no clear timeline. Like a horizontal bathroom stall wall with binding, the pages are marked with abandoned lyrics and late night monologues for unseen strangers.

When I was old enough to stop longing for places and actually go to them, the writing had more to hold. Though it remained cryptic, I can decipher an attempt to keep a record of the life I was living. On one page, in red ink I had written:

“Running down an empty street, I was here.”

17 years ago, I was running, I remember the faces beside me and the cobblestone below. We hadn’t paid our tab and the bartender was running behind us, shouting in French. This one red line delivered a memory while other lines, just as cryptic, delivered nothing.

There is a section where I describe waking up in a bedroom that I had rented from an elderly woman in Sofia, Bulgaria. I described the wallpaper, her family photos, the smell of the room, the humidity, the pattern on the sheets. That I wrote about this, disorients me. I remember Sofia but I don’t actually remember this room or this woman, yet it was the only thing I wrote while I was there.

There are a few different passages where I write about myself in the 3rd person. In these passages, I refer to myself as “the mute.”

Some of these sections are referred to as “Riding With the Mute.”
I referred to myself as the mute because I often made friends with groups of people who I could not speak with due to the lack of a common language. I am not quite sure how I positioned myself into these groups, where everyone but myself laughed and told stories. I remember feeling welcomed, beers were bought for me but I said nothing, so I imagined myself not as a foreigner but as a deaf mute.

I was only there to witness. This suited me. Another stand alone line reads “I have learned so much but I have been told so little.”

Once again, there is no date but perhaps this line was written to let me know how I would feel when I reopened these notebooks a near two decades after they were filled.

Dylan Angell is a North Carolinian who is currently based in Mexico City. In 2016 he released the book, An Index of Strangers Whom I Will Never Forget A-Z, via his Basic Battles Books imprint. He has collaborated on two books with photographer Erin Taylor Kennedy; 2017’s I'll Just Keep On Dreaming And Being The Way I Am and 2018’s Beyond the Colosseum. In 2019 he released Sinking Windows, a bilingual publication that was printed in Mexico City.

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Notebooks, by Dylan Angell