In Which I Find a Notebook

In one of my classes for the past month or so, there has been a spiral notebook floating gradually to the front of the room.  It didn't quite seem to belong to anyone.  I fought every impulse I had to take it the first day that I saw it and instead let it sit for a few weeks, waiting to find its owner.  Apparently, the owner had since moved on to a newer notebook, so I welcomed it into my bag with my pink binder and textbooks.

I came home and started going through it.  Finding an abandoned notebook to me is like finding a discarded diary of a total stranger.  There was only a name on the first page that was tucked away in the pocket of this five subject, UAH spiral notebook.  If I were Evan Fowler, I would have been rather sad because the UAH bookstore overcharges for anything with the school's name on it.  I sifted through a few pages and learned that he was studying chemical engineering, as it was written on the bottom of a sheet of what I could only assume to be homework.  Everything like that seems like gibberish to me; at least with an education major, all of our work is easily read by anyone.  Whether or not it makes sense to everyone is a different story entirely.

I flipped through Evan's work, but learned nothing more personal about him.  It almost seemed like he was in a freshman composition class because he had a handout on flow charts and what looked to be a small storyboard.  I also assume this because the engineering building is across campus from the building where I found the notebook.  There was a lot of math and he drew a cone very well; this impressed me because cones are rather difficult for me to draw.  I did note that he had an odd habit of skipping a strange amount of pages.

I wonder what separated Even from his notebook.  Perhaps his classroom moved when the contractors were installing the new windows and it got lost in the shuffle...  I feared the worst, though.  I know that eventually, someone would recycle it -- or worse, just throw it away.  Instead, I saved this poor little notebook.  I lovingly pulled out all of the scribbled upon pages and all the little perforated edges that strayed in the binding.  I haven't quite decided what I am going to use it for, but at least it won't be wasted.