That certain smell of old paper mixed with blue ink that has been sitting in a cardboard box for months. I am kneeling on the floor of my shared apartment, surrounded by textbooks that I couldn't possibly afford to replace and notebooks I should've thrown away years ago. My fingers are already powdered with dirt from digging through everything, and there's this desperate quality to the way I'm flipping pages, as if I am panning for gold in a landfill.
Three days to my structural geology exam. And my bank account balance is nothing to say. The maths is easy and embarrassing.
I take out this green exercise book; the kind that has the mottled cover that sells for about three hundred naira at the campus bookshop. Half the book is filled with my 200 level note, when I was still imagining that I'd be able to have separate notebooks for each class. Something about reading my own writing from two years previously makes me pause. The letters are neater and smaller. I was trying so hard then to impress, to appear like I belonged in those lecture halls.
The pages groan beneath my fingers as I flip through them. Ballpoint drawings of rock structures. Metamorphic processes explained in step-by-step charts. And then, wedged between a grocery list and doodles that I definitely drew during a boring mechanics class, there's this 'fault systems' page that leaves me frozen.
"Thrust faults occur when compressive stress..."
I remember writing it, sort of. It was Professor Adebayo speaking, his measured, slow way of telling us things twice because he knew half of us weren't hearing him the first time. But I don't remember understanding it then. I must have been thinking about Kemi, or about whether I could afford to eat lunch, or about anything other than how rocks fracture when placed under pressure.
Now, though, standing here with my back to the wall and sunlight casting through dirty windows in the morning, it is obvious. The sketches I made: rough, but accurate. The arrows pointing towards stress direction, the way I labeled the hanging wall and the footwall, even the notes written on the margin about the difference between normal and reverse faults. It's all here, waiting for me like a present I've given myself without knowing it.
I keep flipping. I have more of these notes in front of me now; notes on identifying minerals, on the cycle of rocks, on dating methods. Some of it is wrong, I realize now. There is this one section where I've confused igneous textures that makes me cringe. There's also this diagram of the crystal system which really is excellent, with these tiny memory aids scrawled in the margins that I don't even remember writing.
"Hexagonal - like a benzene ring but 3D," I said. "Orthorhombic - three rectangles holding hands."
I laugh out loud at that one. Holding hands. What kind of geology student describes crystals holding hands? But it works. I can see it now, more clearly than any textbook illustration.
The blank pages start on page forty-something. I count them up — maybe twenty pages left, more than enough to see me through the exam if I am careful with my script. But I don't start writing immediately. Instead, I read over my earlier notes, as if I am having a conversation with my earlier self.
There is an essay on sedimentary environments that I obviously copied word for word from Boggs' textbook. I know it is because the writing is too proper and perfect. But I've added my own in the margins: "Like the beach at Tarkwa Bay - the sand grains are so smooth from all the wave action." And next thing I know, I'm there again, on that field trip when we were supposed to be studying beach processes but actually just took selfies and complained about the sun.
Professor Adebayo made us collect samples anyway. He had a knack of sounding serious about anything, even when we were just scooping handfuls of sand. "This grain," he held something infinitesimal between his thumb and forefinger, "has traveled further than the majority of you will your entire life." I thought he was being dramatic back then. Now I realize that he was talking of deep time, about how rocks tell stories over millions of years.
The notebook is getting heavy in my lap, or maybe (definitely) I'm tired and drowsy. But I mustn't put it down. Here's a paragraph on metamorphic grade that I definitely didn't understand when I wrote it. Handwriting gets progressively more illegible towards the end, as if I was racing to keep up with the lecture. But the information is there. Temperature and pressure conditions, diagnostic minerals, the whole series from slate to schist to gneiss.
I'm supposed to be making notes for my exam right now, but here I am immersed in this archaeology of my own schooling. There's a deep beauty to discovering your own ideas fossilized in this way, like ancient fossils in sedimentary rock. These pages hold iterations of knowledge I'd forgotten that I ever possessed.
The strange thing about it is how clearly I recall it now that I am reading it. The facts, and the context. The way Professor Adebayo would lead us along in suspense before finally revealing the punchline of a geologic mechanism, as if he was reading us the world's most interesting joke.
I start taking new notes on the blank pages, but I keep the old ones. Not completely because I'm too cheap to replace my notebook with a new one, though that's part of it. But I liked extending the conversation between me and my younger self. It was right. The old notes inform the new ones, and the new information gives meaning to the older notes.
By the time I'm done, the notebook is a unified whole, a record of learning stretching years, not weeks. When I finally sit down to take that test and I pass it, which I do pass it, definitively, I know it's not necessarily because I couldn't afford new paper. But because sometimes wisdom lies in excavating your own discarded ideas, in finding value in what you thought was trash.
The conversation between my then-and-now self, immortalized in blue pen and pencil marks, served as a reminder that anything we learn from is never really wasted. It just waits around till we are ready to re-evaluate it all over again.
I still have those notebooks and a few others. And I don't plan to lose them.
Oops!! I should have added a "PG: Geologists" warning :))
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