Small Steps Forward

me and my pen

being a writer, i am a pen-aholic. i am very selective about my writing implements and like to keep my favorites with me.

for awhile, i was buying those pilot pens and feeding them paper regularly, despite my predilection for bending the nib to some weird angle. then they started disappearing. one right after another. normally, i’m quite good about keeping track of my pens. i rarely leave one behind, even when i let others use them. but they started walking away with increasing regularity. until i was down to my last pen. and then, despite my best efforts to stay aware and focused, that one disappeared too.

i had, in my bottom of my bag, a rainbow fisher space pen i was saving for “someday.” up ’til then, i had decided that i didn’t want to chance losing it, so i decided not to use it, but just to hold onto it until … someday. and then i had no pens except the fisher left. oh yes, and no money in the budget for new pens.

i decided to break out the fisher. i was ever so loath too. with my track record of keeping pens around, i just knew that this pen was going to disappear and then i’d really have nothing left.

who’s been touching my tools?

and then, something strange happened. shortly after, i saw one of my classmates looking at the fisher with a look on her face. my pens hadn’t been disappearing; they’d been stolen, courtesy of my classmates.

i was surprised by this. that she was that kind of person, yes. and that she’d have any call for anything like this. but mostly, that for whatever reasons she’d been taking the other pens, she couldn’t steal the fisher. (it was ironic, in a way, because i’d had the fisher pen for months; i was spending money buying the pilot pens so to “save” it. meanwhile, finally using it saved me.)

i still puzzle over that: why she couldn’t just steal the fisher like she’d taken the pilot pens. i think maybe i had introduced infinity to a game of limitation:

• she didn’t have my attention, so she could “gain” it (if even in her own head) by making something i cared about disappear.
• she couldn’t control me (prior to this, i wouldn’t have thought this was a concern for her — who knew?), but maybe she could control my actions. how many pens would have to disappear before i gave up and joined the rest of the bic world?

check … mate

one day you’re walking and for some reason you bend down to look and notice that you’re standing on a chessboard. it’s strange to me that i was playing some game and didn’t know it. and had i not seen her face that day while she was looking at my pen, i might never have known.

odder still to find that you’re on the chessboard, you’re the queen and you’ve captured several pieces already.