Problems of a pen

I used to be useful. Now the ink has dried. The poor artist scratches my tip against the sketch pad to no avail. I’m empty. The ink inside me has dried and no longer flows freely. The artist shakes my clear glass body, evidently frustrated by my inability to function, to create the markings required of a pen. Ink is meant to flow through a pen the way blood flows through a living creature’s veins. But mine has clotted, has stopped working as it ought to.

It wasn't always like this. Nowadays, I spend the majority of my time clicked closed, tip protected from the outside world but also prevented from contacting said world, a barrier for when I'm mistakenly left in a pocket before the artist eventually cleans his laundry. He usually tries to go as long as he possibly can without cleaning his clothes, which means he will wear pants multiple times and forget who he left where. My container-mates (we came from the same supply store container) died in the spin cycle, entombed in a pocket, ruining both their own aesthetic as well as the clothes meant to be washed, although stain remover rescued the clothes. The pens, my forgotten brethren, were doomed to a dump, or first a garbage can, then a garbage truck, then a dump. I should consider myself lucky I have been spared a similar fate.

Now that I'm useless, I too spend the majority of my time on a pocket, albeit one the artist turns to more rarely and one from which I fall out of far more frequently, a shirt pocket. Of course, that's only when the artist forgets I'm useless and takes me (usually with some of my functioning friends) to sketch or take notes. The artist has a new job now, one that takes him and his writing utensils into the city. 

When I worked, I was his favorite pen. He liked me because I wrote like a super-thin Sharpie but had the casing of an ordinary pen. That was why the ink spills of my container-mates were so frequent. But he kept me in a cup on his desk when he wasn’t using me, so I rarely ended up in the spin cycle. Sometimes his parents would even borrow me, and I would be used to write a grocery list or reminder on some scrap paper taped to the front door. Ink flowed less freely when someone tried to use me on a perpendicular surface, so the mom would usually write her reminder on the scrap paper on the kitchen table and then tape said paper to a door. Sometimes afterwards I’d be left on that table. Those were interesting times, witnessing humans consume food and converse, search for and eventually the young artist usually found me, annoyed at his mom for forgetting to return me to him, or sometimes simply relieved to have found me at all, depending on why he needed to write or draw.

Most of the time now, the artist’s relief at my presence only lasts as long as it takes to try and fail to coax my ink into seeping back out through the point - that is, if it takes less than half an hour to make me work again, he will be excitedly relieved I still do work, and if not, half the time he will literally throw me around his bedroom in frustration. Still, my cartridge metaphorically leaps in excitement when he’s able to coax my ink into moving again, when I’m able to function, to not be defunct. That excitement grows all the stronger if the artist decides to steal me away in his pocket again, to expose me to the world outside of his house. The world he likes to draw, the world he once used me to capture in his sketchbook before I faded with age and stopped being the best at my job, that world still exists out there. I’m just useless to it.

The artist still writes and draws, sometimes using me to do so even when my ink fails to flow, before replacing me with an instrument that actually works. Sometimes he used me to fidget, tapping me against his desk, or his leg, running his fingers across the length of my body, indenting my tip into his fingertip in a way that likely caused him some discomfort. I don’t know what discomfort feels like, as pens have no nerve endings, but I felt his skin indent against the tip of me and the hole the tip retreated into, which left an indentation on his fingertip. I felt the pressure that I had learned from taking down his biology notes in university usually resulted in pain. I knew the ideas of discomfort, of pain.

At work, the artist played with his newer, more useful tools, such as his computer and his cell phone. Not a single pen touched paper using his hands certain days, and yet I was still being carried around in his pocket, fidgeted with, treated like I mattered. Maybe I was an idea, a talisman. I liked being in this office - entire rooms were designated specifically for my brethren, papers and pens and copiers and clipboards. But more than that, I felt like I still matter despite my inability to work properly.

One day, at the artist’s home, something new occurred. He unscrewed the pieces of my body, and added a new cylinder of ink to my middle. And then he tested me on the back of an envelope and I worked again! He could write with me, draw the pigeons he watched during his lunch break. I functioned again! The new ink was not Sharpie ink the way I had been filled with before, but instead ballpoint pen ink. But that actually worked better for the purposes the artist was using me for - sketching pigeons required different shades he could create by altering the amount of pressure I put upon the page.