Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Sent away with the mission to pay attention to what he particularly enjoyed the next semester, he found an intro to accounting course unexpectedly soothing. In a moment when everything seemed to be moving quickly and unexpectedly, Truman enjoyed the neat boxes of data and predictable equations.
There were solutions in accounting, and if you simply followed the process the correct answer emerged like magic. There was no uncertainty, no second-guessing. Just clean, definitive numbers.
“You’re a natural,” his professor had said, and he’d been equal parts flattered and embarrassed. When he’d gone home for his mother’s birthday in April and told his family he was going to major in accounting, his eldest sister, Miriam, had laughed.
“That’s so totally adorable,” she’d said. “It’s like when you were a little boy and you dressed in that tiny suit!”
The tiny suit in question had been for Christmas and insisted upon by his parents, but he’d enjoyed putting it on and playing dress-up even afterward.
Eleanor had agreed. “Super cute. You, like, balance us out!” The two had slung their arms around each other’s shoulders, their usual competitiveness evaporating in the face of a common noncreative. “I can’t wait to tell my friends my little brother is a gay accountant,” Miriam had said and ruffled Truman’s hair.
Did he like it?
“I enjoy the order of it. I like organizing things. But it doesn’t, like, make my heart sing, I guess,” Truman said, an extreme understatement.
“What does?”
“Hmm.”
Truman turned around to find Ash’s broad chest closer than he’d expected. He straightened up and swallowed the lump in his throat.
Ash’s eyes were as deep and vast as the ocean. He handed Truman the bouquet he’d just finished, and Truman held it for a moment before his brain caught up with him and he realized it was for photographing.
“Um. Do you really want to know?”
Ash nodded, as if it would never occur to him to ask a question to which he wasn’t interested in hearing the answer.
“Bullet journaling.”
Ash paused. “Sorry, I don’t know what that is.”
Truman was used to this. He pulled out his phone and opened Instagram.
“So, it’s a whole system of organization, but it’s thoroughly customizable to each user. You begin with a blank notebook—I like a dot-grid paper—and an index where you write down where each thing is. Then you lay it out however you like.” He scrolled through examples of people he followed.
“So it’s a calendar, planner, to-do list mash-up?”
“Yeah, exactly. Some people really turn them into amazing works of art.”
Truman opened one of his favorite accounts. She used watercolor in a different palette each month, and for December, she had used black paper that she speckled with silver ink stars, then painted the aurora borealis as the backdrop for her weekly spreads.
“This is gorgeous,” Ash said. “God, it must take forever to do this for every week.”
It did take a great deal of time, but Truman was rarely happier than when he was sitting at his drafting table, listening to ShadowCast, his favorite podcast, a New Orleans–based true crime show, and dreaming up his monthly themes and weekly spreads as Horse snuffled sleepily beside him.
“I love it. Mine aren’t nearly as elaborate as this, though.”
“Do you have an account on here where I can see yours?” Ash asked, peering more closely at his phone.
“Not yet.”
It was a dream of Truman’s that he was trying to work himself up to. But he knew his stark black-and-white spreads could never compete with the gorgeous, colorful, creative art that people posted.
“But, um, I do have my journal here, if you want…?”
Ash nodded emphatically.
Truman lifted the sleeve he kept his journal in and slid it out. As usual, just feeling the heft of paper and ink made him happy.
He placed it on the counter and tried not to look as Ash flipped it open, but he couldn’t help himself. He could see the spot of Wite-Out on the y in February, the place where the ink of a new, untested pen ghosted through the paper in week two of March, and the smear where he’d erased the pencil lines in April’s border before the ink had been completely dry.
“It’s not very—” he began to say, just as Ash looked up at him.
“Holy shit. This is…amazing. This is art. You just make this up?”
Warmth fizzed in Truman’s gut. “Well, I look at a lot of other people’s work online,” he said. “And I’m in a group where we share ideas, and—”
Ash had gone back to flipping through. “But you use this. For your actual planner?”
“Yeah, that’s what it is.”
Ash seemed mesmerized. “This is amazing,” he muttered again.
“Thanks. If you’re into it, I can totally show you how to do it,” Truman offered, realizing perhaps Ash’s awe was more for bullet journaling itself rather than the particulars of Truman’s interpretation.
“Oh, no, thanks. I’m not…organized.” And Ash went back to poring over Truman’s bullet journal.