A Pen, the Pen

I'm writing about a pen. What a facile and dull piece of writing you are about to read, yet, caught in the trap of April sunlight and the emptiness of a classroom, I can't focus on anything else. The whiteness of a board, grey walls lacking home intimacy, and the filled papers that nurture the mind but not the spirit are too obscene to reflect on. To add myself as a storyteller to the general picture, I could describe my fingers that upheld the thousands of paltry pens in moments of their downfalls when words they had created turned into history. The time has slowly plucked out veins from my hands, and they, with their servility to yet another spring, show up as the incorrectly split ink on the paper; my mind buzzing with forgotten words of two languages. Reflecting on my legs that reside in the duality of incurable genetic faults and untouched physiological potential, I could make the readers feel every centimeter of the space between my feet and the damp earth. There is a substantial reason for my fears, for I read and scared myself and revisited the news about the collapse of a residential building in Florida in 2021 over and over; in a multitude of parallel universes, one past summer and one present spring inosculate into inseparable inflorescence of eternity. Branches of a climbing plant - connections between the past, present, and the future - first entangle my body, to which my hands and legs are attached, then radiate beyond the concrete school building, encompassing the city, the country, the globe, and reaching the end of the universe in the unstoppable wave of causes and effects. My dark blue ballpoint pen - a super soft grip, a metal clip on the side, and a narrow black belt on the spot where two halves are tied - predicts what might come out of the cocoon when the connections compress the ever-expanding reality too much: a new story is born. 

As it has to be evident by this point, I'm not free in my decisions. With the certainty of upcoming scoliosis, the pen includes me in the story, outlining the hunched female figure bending over a paper, the slightly draped window providing light to eliminate shadows. Me and the sheets, and the pen, and the black laptop on the table - this morning is the privation of darkness. If I were not so self-absorbed in writing, I would consider the shadows' absence as the abomination, the glitch in The Matrix where the confrontation of the light and dark is the criterion of the intellectual gamut. My pen gains power from the swaying sanity of Nietzsche, the Siberian resurrection of Dostoevsky, and the gallows despair of 'The Seven Who Were Hanged.' Lucidity as the killer of imagination; how can the pen design worlds if every word is devoid of synonyms? What's left, then? The fate of storytellers stuck in the bright April morning is to bead one word after another in fruitless labor, between the cousins of 'meaning of life' and 'ideas for a short story' in the search panel.   

My crucifix consists of three parts: I hide the feelings I'm undergoing, I avoid the fillings I should be writing about, and I detest the personal fallings I have already registered on the paper. The pen draws the blue nails on my heart while the ropes, holding together my entire knowledge of the English language, fail me miserably, getting lost between F and L. The letters' incompleteness - two and one horizontal lines instead of the magical three - drives me further away from the recognition of the morning beauty. The poet-in-me laments over the missed opportunity to enjoy the sky, perforated by clouds, and the dotted fuzziness of the old birches whose sleepy shadows over a bench cover up inappropriate students' writings. Oil of the Tallinn air placidly flows down on the dirty buses and clean cars, unseen from the classroom's window. Rings and squares drawn on the back schoolyard's asphalt contain more children's emotions than the rectangles of the desks and the even ticking of a circle inside the classroom. Neither me, who is writing, nor the future me, who will edit the story, move the curtain to the side and glance toward the affirmation that the summer is coming. I'm mesmerized by another perspective of how the story - and, in unison, I and the pen - pierce the unexplored wilderness of the future, sending to hell Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and the early going to bed. My imagination can get me to the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, long ago descended to the legendary level, or party with Nero, watching Rome burn. Instead, I choose the hard path, meaning the line that has not been created yet and which germs, like the first grass sprouts, loosen the classroom's silence here and there. As I diligently write, future-me peeling the wrapper of the present-me starting from the brain, objects in the room also move forward, though slower. Paper sheets with exercises, afraid to fall to the floor, grab the windowsill by the dead printed words. A shell of forty-five minutes, the time interval I have for myself, sucks in dusty, unused dictionaries and takes along an old bookshelf that covers the whole wall to my left. Two bright-green tables as the mold in an abandoned building splash the right wall. There is no reason for me to write on the slightly crooked whiteboard - one leg has a defect - that stands at the other end of the classroom, near the door leading to the school corridor of the second floor, leading to the giant hall of the inter-floor space, leading to... As some lazy student, not a teacher, not a storyteller, not past-me, who liked studying because it was the only way out of bullying, I'm mentally jumping from one step to another until I reach the front schoolyard, waving freedom as if it's a school bag.

PS from myself, 8 hours later.

I was writing about the pen. It turned out to be an insipid story because my pen has never let me forget: the feelings I am hiding, the fillings I am avoiding, and the fallings I've already registered on paper are my eternal crucifix. Writing a story is hardly brain surgery; it takes effort to write about an ordinary thing of everyday life. Going in the wrong order, from the present to the future and then back to the past, giving victory to the head rather than to the heart, I transformed A pen into THE pen. A pen becomes THE pen from the very moment it starts to dance on the paper.