Unlimned No More


Morning breaks. The sun creeps over the house next door. The dew disappears. The day heats up, and the air conditioner creaks on, bracing itself for nonstop spinning after a night of sporadic work. I watch the unfurling of the day, feel the sun's warm rays come in through the window into the office where I live, placidly view the butterflies float on a breeze so small that only they can feel it. Summer has come, and summer is here to stay.

I prepare for another day of ennui. My friends and I have sat abandoned in our home for over three weeks. The routine of sunrise, noon, sunset has become a curse, for without steady use, we slowly die; ink dries up, erasers harden, paint flakes away. My friends have every right to complain; as hardworking pens, they are used to signing documents or etching answers onto tiny sections of white paper. They mourn Late May, when our mistress used them to aid her studying so much that they ran out of ink minutes after she picked them up. Those were the days, they say. That was when we were real pens! We had use! We were important!

I stay silent. I cannot add to the glorious days of Late May. I did not take part in it. I am a Ticonderoga, part of a beautiful race of pencils with silvery gray graphite tips, bright yellow painted shafts, shining green ferrules, and soft pink erasers of the highest quality. ? am part of a proud breed. And a dying one. Of all the writing implements in the pencil holder, I am the last wooden pencil left. And I am hardly ever used.

I was bought when my mistress was in second grade as part of a twelve-pack of Ticonderogas. She used these pencils quite frequently, and my brothers and sisters disappeared in regular intervals. By the end of the school year, I was the only one left.

Either coincidence or Fate allowed for me to be undisturbed for ages. As year after year passed, I grew jealous of my siblings. They had written for my mistress. They had lived their lives as good writing implements. I felt ashamed to have never written a single iota.

My chances were lessened even more by the advent of cyber schooling and mechanical pencils. When my mistress left the classroom behind and began the process of cyber schooling, I was rescued from my twelve-pack box and placed in the pencil holder that is now my home. I expected to write something at last, but I sat there more as a decoration than an implement for expressing thought, as my mistress was an advocate for 'progress' and 'efficiency'. If she didn't have to, she would never write anything on a piece of paper; instead she wrote it on her computer. And wooden pencils were too much of a fuss; they stained her hands and smeared gray lead all over her work and sharpening them was just a pain. So she used mechanical pencils when she was required to use a writing implement. I rested forgotten in my place, just hoping that she would pick me up just once.

That was not to be. When she returned to a traditional school, even the mechanical pencils were forgotten; smooth-ink, small-tipped, Asian pens with stars and cabbages on them were all the rage, and my mistress wrote primarily with those instruments.

My problem with living such a long time, with never writing can be stressed this way: a pencil's life is only supposed to be two to eighteen months long. I am seven years old. I have outlived my brothers and sisters by four lifetimes and I believe I will never be used. I want to feel ideas shoot through me onto paper. I want to be sharpened to a stub and thrown away knowing that I have forced volumes of ideas into the world. But without recognition, without a job, I am nothing. I am useless, and that is more painful than being broken in two.

My friends and I continue on in silence as the morning wears away. Noon comes and goes. The butterflies disappear, the window grows hot, the air conditioner grumbles on. About three hours after noon my mistress rushes into the office. She sits down and shakes her computer awake. She prints a document and tries to attach it to a form, but before she does, her mother calls out instructions to her. This event does not excite me or bother me; it happens all the time, and I have learned to ignore it. I listen in uninterested silence.

"Honey, you need to handwrite your essay. In pencil," her mother calls.

"What? Why pencil?" shouts my mistress.

"I don't know. That's what the form says," her mother returns. "I'm sorry, I know it's inconvenient."

My mistress scrambles for a pencil.

"Why are there no mechanical pencils around when I need one?" she mutters.

She spies me. Now I am forced to take notice of her scrambling. Is this it? I wonder. Is this the day my mistress finally uses me? She picks me up reluctantly. She pokes my uncut head into a sharpener, which for its small size packs a shocking amount of sting into two moving blades, and presses me against lined paper.

For a short time we are one. She channels her thoughts into me, and I channel those thoughts into symbols, into words. We move from word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. Introduction, body, conclusion. Idea one, idea two, tie both ideas together in body paragraph three. I move smoothly across the paper, writing faster than I had ever dreamed I could write. My mistress's dreams, hopes, and thoughts are beautiful, frightening things, things to be captured and put into words, into symbols. I am truly disappointed when we reach the concluding sentence.

The minute she is done my mistress drops me onto the desk. She staples the lined paper to the form and leaves as abruptly as she came.
I settle on the desk. The task of writing was exhausting, more demanding than I had thought it would be. The several times I had been sharpened were incredibly painful, and I now have permanent chew marks around my ferrule. But despite the damage writing had caused to my physical appearance, the ideas that had been channeled through me still cling to my graphite core. I am enthralled by the beauty and grace of the words, how they stick together and fall apart.

I am just a tool. My life, be it long or short, does not matter. What does matter are the words that I write. I will eventually crumble, an ordinary an unrecognized pencil, but the words I help my mistress craft will live on long after we are both gone. They might live on forever.

As the sun dies, the air conditioner ceases its rattle, and the fireflies come out, I lay on the desk and think about the subject of the essay, a young teen who died in a tragic event:

"I wish to go on living even after my death." - Anne Frank