The Diary of Lost Leaves

This was the second time I'd found the book. The last time was almost fifty years ago in a private collection. I wasn't looking for it then either.

The first time I saw the book, it was on an old bookshelf filled with occult tomes bound in burgundy leather or black. Those sombre tomes were lettered with gold leaf and were titled deeply esoteric names like "An Unabridged Discourse on the Origins of Theosophical Mystery, volume 47" or "De Vermis Mysteriis". These were heavy tomes, and reading them required both physical and mental effort. However, this book was a small thing; maybe 6 inches by 9, about the size of an A5 page, and just under half an inch thick (perhaps thicker than a centimetre). Unlike the other books, it had no title, and was bound in leather dyed a colour between blue and green. It's cover adorned with a stylised dragonfly in a circle. It was an unremarkable book, and easily overlooked. Yet once noticed, it was incredibly distinct. 

I had never seen another like it, and here it sat amidst the scattered second hand texts in a trash-and-treasure sale operated by a local charity group. 

I flicked through the pages and saw many of the same hand-drawn sketches, hand-written notes in half dozen different scripts. I remembered some of the diagrams of circles and cycles, the passages written from the perspectives of beings existing outside time and space. I remembered wondering why such creatures would relate things in a journal like this. Yet somehow there were differences. 

I hadn't spent long with the book when I saw it last, only an evening. This time I knew I couldn't part with it. The charity worker asked $5 for the book. I was happy to hand over a $50 note, knowing that some collectors had spent years trying to track it down and would pay far more.

This evening in the privacy of my home, I carefully pored over the book. I had remembered more of the pages filled when I saw it last. Someone seemed to have careful removed pages that had been covered in text and illustrations...replacing them with blank pages of identical parchment. Similarly, pages that I remembered torn from the journal were now intact, some of them adorned with intricate watercolour images and sketches of fantastic creatures and elaborate charts, others covered in lines of scrawled script detailing energy sources and biopsychokinetic catalysts, and things that felt like they might be meaningful to someone with the right understanding. 

Lots of dragonfly imagery, lots of ponds and references to reflective surfaces. It all felt familiar, or felt like it should be, or maybe would be when the time as right. I'll spend the rest of tonight scanning the pages of the book onto a hard drive and make a few copies of it, maybe even send a copy to the cloud. I don't want to lose this again.