Pens ~ A Narrative

  I have an abundance of pens. Every color, every shape, pens and pencils in every imaginable size, used and not yet used… My entire office is filled with them. What a weird thing to collect, some might think. Why wouldn’t you collect something with value, something like fine vases, paintings or even expensive cups? But my beloved pens are  just like any other collection in the world. My pens are something special to me, and every single one has a story.

  The yellow one with small flowers on it, I got for my birthday five years ago. My daughter gave it to me, saying she knew that I loved pens “almost as much as you love me and mommy”. Yellow is her favorite color, and thus I keep it in the pen stand on my desk, at a spot where I can see it no matter where in the room I am.

In the bottom drawer, there is an old lead pencil, only a centimetre long, rolling around without a case. It was the first pen I bought when I started college, and the only one I used during the first three weeks.

  I don’t think I have ever thrown a pen away.

  I got the blue one on my desk during the first date I went on with my wife. She picked it up from the ground, where it had rested between a small twig and a piece of chewed gum, astonished that someone would throw such a fine object away so carelessly. She smiled as she gave it to me, and it has been with me ever since.

  The problem with collecting pens however, is that they’re ordinary. When someone dies and leaves a collection of art, no one questions whether they should be kept or not, same goes for a collector’s edition of fine cutlery.  But pens are ordinary. When I die, who will keep my collection? My ordinary pens, representing parts of an extraordinary life… Only a few will understand the value of a pen.

  A pen is a very ordinary object, when held in the hand of any one person. But give a pen to a person harboring an idea, and watch the world change around you. An invention, a drawing, a book or a poem, the first draft to an excellent movie… Everything is lost without a pen. Without a way to express them, thoughts remain inside us, and even though it is said that you can’t kill an idea, you can certainly kill the person harboring it.

  When it is my time to go, and none of the ideas left in my head will ever be put to paper, who will take on my collection? For pens are, after all,  such ordinary objects. Aren’t they?