I didn’t hold on to things, because holding on to things hurt. If you didn’t hold on, then when you lost something you lost it easy.
But if you don’t hold on, you lose things all the time.
My notebooks and pens are still solid. I can write all the time. Under any conditions. I can write things down.
If I can just remember them.
I can write them down.
I lost a lot of pens.
I couldn’t bear to write in pencil. And it didn’t matter because I was burning the books.
But I couldn’t seem to hang on to the pens.
It’s in the notebooks, isn’t it? The thing I need.
There’s no way to get the notebooks back, of course. Even if I found similar ones, they’d be empty. All the important words—all of the words that have the memories attached that might keep people from being hurt—set on fire, burned up—were, in a particularly distasteful irony, burned up themselves long ago.
Oh. But the pens.
I started collecting pens when I was very young. My mother gave me a fountain pen. Not an expensive one, but she wrote with fountain pens, and she thought I should, too, and I was excited to be like my mother in this way I thought was grownup and cool. One led to two, led to five or six. Student pens.
I loved them.
And the ink! I loved the ink even more. Because you can put the same ink in a cheap pen as in an expensive one, and then you get to write with it.
Finding the right ink, the right pen, is like coming home. Like finding the place you live and that you want to live. The place you want to stay forever. The place where you belong.
On a smaller scale, of course.
But still, it can make you a little bit emotional.
And if you are lucky, you might actually recognize it while it’s right in front of you, while you’re standing there, and not once you walk away, foolishly.
The hardest thing is when you walk away from home knowing that it’s home, because home is changing, or challenging, or making you sad. Or because you screwed up and broke something, and you think you’re too embarrassed to stay, or you’re not welcome there anymore.
So you go someplace else and think you can live there. But it isn’t home. And then you have to try to get home again.
Sometimes it takes a long time to get home again. Some people never make it back at all.
I thought I had to be perfect. I thought I couldn’t live with my errors. I thought it would be better to run away. Start clean. Throw the ruined page away and keep reaching for a clean one. Burn my notebooks.
Erase my history. Erase my screw-ups.
Erase my self.
Erase, erase, erase.
I start on collector’s websites and then on auction sites, looking for the pens. Most of them were not expensive at the time when I bought them—I never had a lot of money. Some of them have gotten more expensive since.
A funny thing happens as I start looking. I search for one pen to see what it would cost to replace it. And in the related items, I find more that looked familiar. That I suddenly remember having had. And when I chase those links, there are more, still more familiar-looking ones.
I am forty-five years old. I think I am forty-five years old.
I get out my birth certificate and check.
I am forty-five years old.
How many pens have I lost?
How many other things have I forgotten about, before now?
I think of a pen I’d liked, when I was twenty-five or so. I remember putting it in a jacket pocket. I don’t remember ever finding it there again. It had been a blue marbled plastic fountain pen, a kind of bulbous and silly looking thing. A lot of personality, I guess you’d say. It wrote very well.
I find one like it on an auction site. I lose that auction but win another in a few days. $63 plus shipping. I think the pens in a box set with ink were $30 new back in 1995.
Fortunately my books are doing all right, and my needs in general are few. My chief extravagance is a little indulgence in grocery store sushi, once in a while. I use a grocery delivery service. I can’t drive. What if my foot fell off while I was reaching for the brake?
The pen arrives after three days. I get lucky with the mail that day and it doesn’t fall through my hands. I take the pen out of the box, weigh it in my hand. Light, plastic with gold trim. The blue is so intense it seems violet.
I uncap it and look at the point, squinting my middle-aged eyes. Then I laugh at myself and use the zoom function on my phone camera to get a better look at it. The phone, for once, doesn’t slide through my hand.
The mysterious internet stranger I’d bought it from hadn’t cleaned it very well. I get a bulb syringe and wash it at the sink, soaking and rinsing. You’re supposed to use distilled water but the water here at my house is soft, from a surface reservoir. The same reservoir H. P. Lovecraft once wrote about, as the towns that now lie under it were drowning.
Anyway, I’ve never had any problems with it. Even if it is saturated in alien space colors, they don’t seem to cause problems with the nibs, so that’s good news overall.
Once it’s clean, I ink it up from a big square bottle in a color that matches the barrel, and sit down at the table with a notebook, ready to write.
With the pen in my hand, I find suddenly I am full of memories. Strange; I can go through a whole day, usually, without remembering things.
I remember the pen.
And now I’m holding it in my hand, and I start to write, in a lovely red-sheened cobalt blue.
I grew up to be a writer. A novelist. That will not surprise you. You are, after all, reading my words right now.
I write, and write, and the pen stays solid and the notebook stays solid and it writes as well as the one I used to have. But my right hand—I’m left-handed—has a tendency to slide through the table if I’m not paying attention. And twice I fall right through my chair, which is a new and revolting development.
I don’t let it stop me, though. I write, and remember, and write some more. About somebody I can sort of remember. A long, long time ago.
An incident that happened at the University of Chicago. After… after I stopped being a student there?
It’s so damned hard to recall.
“There is no point in being so angry.” His words had the echo that used to come from long distance.
But I wasn’t being angry to make a point.
…which was not something the manipulative son of a bitch could have ever understood. I was angry because I was angry. Because he deserved my anger.
I was angry because anger is a defense mechanism. It’s an emotion that serves to goad you to action, to remove the irritant in your turf or the thing that is causing you pain.
“I’m angry because you’re hurting me,” I said. “I’m angry because you’re hurting a lot of people. Stop it, and I won’t need to be angry with you anymore.”
Therapy gives you a pretty good set of tools to be (diplomat B), it turns out. I was still furious with my mother for forcing me to go.
But it was helping.