Paper

"You should do something with your drawings", he said.

His eyes scaled the piles of loose and overlapping multi layered sketches - on shopping bags and bar napkins and take out menus and sales receipts; and the heavily worked thick lined diagrams on coarse brown paper scoured with feverish intent - some so emphatically rendered they could be "read" through their backs with the finger tips: legible, though incoherent Braille. His eyes scuttled across where they had settled into the lees of messy tabletops and eddies of cluttered corners like fall leaves swept by a down pour. The disorder made him stiffen. Before though, from the far side of the room, I had seen him tentatively extract a few and examine the marks that covered them.

"Do what?"
I smiled and winced, lifted my pencil and slid a dog eared magazine over the one in front of me, eyes lowered and hand cupped to conceal the shiny graphite burnishing my right fingers and palm.
"They're done. No one will ever see them - even you only look at it all as a landscape. Just wrinkled papers everywhere."

He frowned.
"No. You should put them all together. Together. Make a book out of them or bind them or something."

I thought about it. One, under my coffee cup, was scribbled with several song titles to down load, a cell phone number and e-mail address, and colored pencil describing changes to a store front I regularly pass: cobalt glazed brick newly scraped mostly free of soot and black paint and now paired with the orange brown of rusting steel and some dull aluminum.
"Maybe."

Considering the paper further (remember: call P.!), I saw that the aluminum would have to be changed to stainless steel - unpolished, yes, but still with more reflectivity. It would sparkle in the raking light of late afternoon just before the street lights came on.

"Yes." I removed the coffee cup. "Maybe I should gather them up."

I found a white pencil and added highlights to the edges of imaginary openings cut through imaginary steel.
"That sure would make it a lot easier to throw them all away."

I smiled again, and dug through the desktop sediments for the pink eraser - though it's harder on the surface than the white, it doesn't smear as much - and set upon the paper to correct it.