I always start out with no plan (not in life, in scrapbooking). Let’s be clear that in life, I will draft out a five word text to someone in my notes app for ten minutes before I even think about sending it. But in the creative realm, I tend to go in without a clear-cut idea. I sprawl out the collection of newspapers I haven’t ever been bothered to look at until now, and begin flipping through until my eye latches onto a word it finds intriguing.
Working in silence, in the perfect state of flow. Every couple minutes, one of my friends makes a remark and then we all drift back into a state of mindless bliss. Even with Clairo playing faintly in the background, her voice becomes one with our surroundings. For the four hours I daze off cutting, arranging and gluing varying sizes and colors of letters onto the blue construction paper, my mind has never felt so silent. Silent, yet far from empty. I flip through the McGill Daily and spot the word “home.” I can already see the first draft of my paper in my mind’s eye – a colorfully chaotic collage of my second year university apartment. My eyes are drawn to the phrase “shared serenity” and “bean bag-padded, ambient musical haven.” The feeling of home transfers itself from my mind to the momentarily blank page as I begin pasting words that came from an article about a communal space in Montreal and apply my own meaning to them.
I envision how I feel when I lay on the pale bluish-green carpet in the center of our living room. The carpet that once was rolled up in plastic wrap in IKEA, which then made its way to my freshman year dorm room in Royal Victoria College Residence. The soft square of pieced-together yarn I would sit on when I used to invite my soon to be roommate over to my dorm room. We would each have a cup of tea so graciously provided from the tiny, foldable kettle I plugged into my dorm room wall. The carpet where we would watch “Is It Cake?” on Netflix and only then, would every thought in my mind find a way to transform itself into words. Words I had been looking for the past eight months. Thoughts I had been attempting to say every Saturday morning when we ate sunrise sandwiches and drank the atrocious French vanilla coffee that had become a type of comfort for me in the dining hall. The tangled, disorganized memories I had been trying to share that could not manage to arrange themselves into a sentence finally found their footing on that carpet.
That carpet continued its journey to my first apartment, where it currently resides in front of our colorfully comfortable pull out couch. And every time I sprawl myself out onto its welcoming array, I can’t help but feel at ease. It has become the place where my roommate and I talk for hours about nothing and everything because nothing is real on the carpet. Where my words, although still chaotic, find it almost effortless to travel down the path from my mind to my mouth.
And all of a sudden it is the last day of my second year of university. I walk out of the Tomlinson Fieldhouse after finishing my last exam, and absolutely no part of my body feels a sense of closure. After spending every waking minute actively recalling the main hormones of the endocrine system and theories of intelligence, my mind’s first instinct is to flinch at the sudden feeling of nothingness in my mind. I reject all of feelings of relief that attempt to flow in and actively seek out some form of stress to keep my mind occupied. Walking back to my apartment, I am completely oblivious to the fact that I just completed another 15 credits of my university degree. I enter my apartment and my mind yearns for something to do, because it can’t bear to sit in silence for five seconds. I pull out my scrapbook, which is dwindling down to its last few blank pages, as it has been filling up since September 2023. I lift the overflowing bucket of newspapers mounted on the top shelf in my closet and pull out the scissors, glue stick covered in residue from the last time I used it, and several editions of McGill Tribune. I dig through the box to find a program from an opera I saw with my friends earlier this semester. Placed atop of it, another program from the Symphonic Band Club’s Spring concert. With each creased paper, my mind can’t help but think back to everything that happened this semester. So I start cutting and pasting random words and letters that don’t make sense to my eyes but make perfect sense in my timeline of the semester. Regardless of the state of mind I start in, a blank canvas and a seemingly blank mind always finds a way to transform itself into a creative display of my emotions. Emotions that were always present, but I had been oblivious to their constant lingering until I put them on paper.