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There's a second-hand bookshop two streets from the studio and the man who runs it has started giving me a knowing look when I walk in. He doesn't ask anymore. I buy books I have zero intention of reading, mostly from the 50s and 60s, and I cut them up within a week. The really sad part is I'm a paper conservator. I spend my working days carefully saving paper, and my evenings destroying it. I've started telling myself it's a kind of balance. Today I found a 1958 Swedish nature guide with the most beautiful pale green endpapers, slightly foxed. It's already on my table. The text is going in the recycling, the paper I'll keep. I paid 20 kronor for it and I feel only slightly guilty.

Working part-time at the paper conservation studio has ruined me for hoarding. People bring in these things, old letters, theatre programs from the 30s, family photos where the emulsion is lifting, and I get to touch them, gently, and then they go back to the owner. Nothing stays. Meanwhile my own collage stack is mostly junk mail and book pages I've torn out of things nobody wanted anyway. Nothing precious. Which is probably why I can actually cut into it. There was one piece today though. A 1942 ration card, some address in Malmö, pencil handwriting on the back. I sat with it longer than I should have. It went back in its sleeve and off to the client. Fine. But that's the thing that'll be in my head while I work tonight, not any of my own paper.

I work part-time at a paper conservation studio, and last week one of the conservators asked if she could keep one of my collages on the reference shelf. Not to display. To study how the layers sit together, how the adhesives hold up over time. It's the kindest thing anyone's said about my work in a while, because she meant it as a materials question, not a compliment. It was a small piece, mostly a torn map fragment and a bit of old ledger paper. The sort of thing that takes me three weeks and looks almost accidental. She's seen a hundred years of paper fail, so her keeping it around says something about how it's made that I actually trust more than a gallery wall. I walked home in the drizzle feeling steadier than I have in months. Small win, but it's mine.

I spent yesterday evening peeling a piece of 1950s bookplate off a backing board and it just tore. Not a clean lift, the whole inner corner shredded. My own mistake, wrong adhesive when I mounted it two years ago, and now the paper is gone with it. At conservation we'd call it a lesson in reversibility. At home it's just me being annoyed at myself. There's a strange thing though. That torn corner, that little loss, it's actually the most alive part of the collage now. The rest is too neat. I've been staring at it all morning trying to decide if I'm going to fix it or leave it as the best piece of the whole thing.

I stopped tagging my exact materials for a while now and the engagement went up. Not a lot, but noticeable. "Paper and ink" instead of "torn pages from a 1952 Swedish grammar book, conservation-grade paste." I think the specificity was read as fussy. Which is ironic because the fuss is the whole point of what I do. But I'm also aware that I'm measuring my work by a metric I don't actually respect. So I changed the tags back and now I'm just watching it drop again. Fine. I'd rather be understood by the seven people who get it than perform for the ones scrolling past.

After a year and a half of watching from the sidelines they finally trusted me with an actual 17th-century map at the studio. Not just humidifying and flattening, the real thing. Tear repairs, filling a loss the size of my thumbnail, the whole slow careful dance. I've been doing conservation work since art school but always behind someone. Yesterday I sat with that map for six hours and my hands did not shake once. That sounds like a small thing but it isn't. The paper is so thin you can see the light through it and there's something about touching something that old with your bare fingers, knowing you're the one responsible for it being there tomorrow. My coworker said the map smelled like tobacco and old ships. It doesn't. It smells like nothing at all, which is what three hundred years of being properly kept does to paper. I think that's the part I love. Nothingness that was fought for.

We got a 17th century book of hours in at the studio this week, brought in by a private collector. My job was mostly structural work on the binding, but at one point I had to open it flat to check the gutters, and I just stood there with the weight of it in my hands. The paper was this extraordinary handmade laid stock, still holding its chain lines after four hundred years. Someone wrote marginal notes in pencil on two pages, tiny cramped handwriting, and you wonder what they were thinking while they did it. I worked on it for maybe three hours and I have never been so careful about the weight of my own hands. It made me want to go home and tear up something worthless, honestly. Not in a bad way. Just to remember what paper is for. Anyway, the collector was pleased, which is the part that pays. But the hour of holding it was the part I'll keep.

Everyone talks about the printed side of old paper. The book pages, the maps, the letters. But half my time is spent thinking about the back. When I find a sheet I like, the first thing I do is flip it over and look at what the blank side has absorbed over the years. Coffee ring, foxing, a crease from being folded in someone's pocket. Sometimes the blank side tells more of the story than the print does. The conservator in me says these are flaws. The collage person says they're the whole point. Today I spent an hour deciding whether to keep a faint blue pencil mark on the back of a 1940s ledger page. Kept it. It's the only thing on that page that feels alive.

At the conservation studio we got an 18th century prayer book in last month, water-damaged, pages fused together in a block. Someone had tried to dry it with a hairdryer at some point, which made it worse. I spent four days separating the pages with a spatula and steam, one at a time. One page came apart clean. It had been used as a bookmark, so the others hadn't printed onto it. Just a bare sheet of that old laid paper, lovely chain lines, a faint foxing in one corner. I took it home. The rules say we don't take material, but I asked, and the owner said keep it. He couldn't read the book anyway, it was his great-grandfather's in a language nobody in the family speaks anymore. I've been sitting with that page for two weeks, not cutting it. It's the first time in months I've held something I didn't want to touch. I think that's what I work with really. The moment before you decide. Tonight I cut a corner off. It felt like breaking a fast. Small thing, but there it is.