It is these types of nights that make every cell of my body want to do something other than study. Even though I know that in only two days I am going to have the worst day of my life and probably the worst panic attack ever. But still, here I am at 10:24pm on a Tuesday night forcing myself to not procrastinate which is definitely not working, but I’m trying. Well, there is something about something that makes me feel this way and I am all for it. You know those days when you are meant to study and the ones you spend trying to create the perfect environment to study, but eventually end up watching educational videos on YouTube which are still equivalent to studying. To be true I am not for the whole educational system that we follow. I mean, just think about it, having your life controlled and instructed to you by bells and teachers leave no room for a child’s imagination. It’s not just about creativity but it’s also about looking at people as people and not as their grade. Well, I am not going to elaborate on that because this will turn into a letter to the UN. I would rather soak up the few moments of peace and solitude that I have left in my make-shift fort which I have created at the back of my door. It has all the comfort you’ll ever need. It has blankets, uncountable pillows and my never-ending stack of books. I mean, if the books were something other than math practice books then, the stack of books would never be minded. It is weird to think of my situation right now. I mean I could have used my whole room, I could have sat on my bed, or on my black couch or on the huge window sill in my room, but I chose the back of my door. I feel life too is sometimes like this, you could have everything in life but the smallest weirdest part of your life could give you immense pleasure. Which for me is the fort.
I was in deep thought this morning about the most mystifying thing ever….my black pen. Now you might think what is so special in my black pen, well, the truth is, I don’t know myself. See this is what makes it so fascinating, I could have again been in deep thought about so many things in life and the one thing I chose to think about was the black pen that was sitting twenty-one feet away from me. It is truly fascinating to see all the unexplainable ways the human brain works. I could have had a million other worries in my mind but, the one I paid attention to was my black pen. It is a very ordinary black pen. I bought it at this stationary shop 2 blocks away from home for $6 to be exact. It has a 0.5 tip which makes my handwriting look way better than it actually does. We have to agree that this sounds like I am trying to sell it to you when I’m not. Maybe the reason I was thinking about it so much was because I was dying to have it in my hand and scribble down the most baloney I could think of at that moment. You know this world we create that is to us the perfect place to ever live? Where you can get away from this common, simple and selfish world we live in everyday. Don’t mind me saying that it’s a selfish world…because it is. Tell me how is it not selfish? We use natural resources to sustain ourselves and when we exploit them we try to save them for nobody but us, because “we” are the only ones that need them. We don’t say that we are doing it for the plants or the animals but we are always doing everything for ourselves. The black pen at that moment of time was an escape for me. An escape from the mundane materialistic world I was living in or it could have been a mere excuse to put off studying. But either way I was still thinking about it. Sometimes I too think what there is to think about a black pen, but tell me what can you not think about it? Well, for starters if you’re a technical junky then you might wonder how the pen works or you may not, because why would you even think of it. Or if you are like me you would spend hours on thinking how Jane Austen ever wrote Pride and prejudice with that inefficient quil. All things apart, it would not get out of my mind. It reminded me of so many times in the past when I would just have that one black pen in my hand and all my emotions and life depended on that simple instrument. Lately I feel as if the word ’emotion’ is always taken in a wrong way as if everyone that uses it needs mental help. But I don’t know if it’s just the people or it’s me that’s ashamed of using it. But I needed the pen. I needed it to survive in this normal world that I liked to believe I didn’t fit in. Is it just me or does every teenager think that they are all different from the rest of the world? I mean, we all get that it is an awkward stage in life but to truly give it a thought, I might not be so different than I think I am. I might think differently of life than the other millions of teenagers in this world but everything other than that, is quite the same. I say things that I regret later, I fall for people who deceive, thought I was in love many times, but other than those things I can’t point out anything significant. But when this thought decided to progress I decided not to be like the other millions of teenagers and follow down in its spiral, so I came back to my other “very important” thought…..the black pen. It really meant so many things! it was the first pen I held in my hand when I wrote my first poem, which till this day even after receiving mixed reviews about it is my favorite work of art. I held that pen as a friend not as an instrument because at that moment of time that pen for me was my voice. It was the power I felt every time I held it in my hand as a sword in the battlefield, well if you hadn’t yet understood the way I think the battlefield refers to the world. It was not an object, in those moments the pen held more human emotions and characteristics a human could ever hold for me. It was my passageway to my world that I wish I could live in but unfortunately which could not bear my presence more than a few moments a day. So now tell me, how could the pen be just an object? It couldn’t be, because it held more meaning to me than the world.
It is also oftentimes in my day that I spent thinking about so many other things that were as useless as the pen and my indifference in this world but those thoughts proved that I could think, which I always doubted if I could. They also had a very unusual significance in my mind. And suddenly, the clock struck thirteen and the most unusual realisation came to me. The pen was like Dorian Gray’s portrait. Yes! That’s what it is- the pen is like Dorian Grey’s portrait for me. Well, if you don’t know who Dorian Gray is this statement makes no sense. Dorian Gray is a character by Oscar Wilde who is very handsome and beautiful just like the boy at school who called me beautiful the other day but the total opposite of him. Gray is the guy that thinks of his portrait as his soul, the one that is going to face age and wrinkles, the one that is going to absorb all his sins and still be beautiful. Well as I say this now, I am beginning to wonder how the pen is ever going to be like the portrait, but somehow it still seems to resemble the portrait in a very unusual way, as usual. Well, the pen is not going to absorb my sins and wrinkles but it is going to absorb all my thoughts and ideas. It is going to absorb all my love and hatred in its black ink that is going to seep into paper which sometimes might be thick or sometimes thin, but it does not actually matter because obviously the ink needs somewhere to seep in and this again brings me back to doubting myself and wondering I can still think. The black ink flows like a river in my mind the one no dam could ever stop. The river would still flow with its uncontrollable force and it would one day be recognised by someone worthy. Maybe him. The pen is absorbs all my gratitude for my friends and family, it is going to absorb my gratitude towards the boy that treated me so well and actually made me feel special and it is going to absorb all my hatred for the education system for not thoroughly understanding a child’s capabilities. I hate jumping to conclusions when I talk about love and hate because they are emotions that can change in a split second. I might “love” someone today and tomorrow I might just fall out of it. But the thing is that the pen won’t judge me for doing that. It wont question my decision to love or not love somebody. I can seem desperate for love one moment and the other I would start thinking of it just as a fantasy. This is what allures me to the pen, it would never judge me for falling in and out of love. Well, it’s not just love, it won’t judge me for anything to be true. It wont judge me if I decide to write a suicide letter one day or maybe a letter to my mother telling her why I ran from home…..which I don’t plan on doing if that’s what you’re wondering. The pen is the only object that can portray the transition of my dumb unsympathetic teenage thoughts in the most subtle and respectful way. It is safe to say that the pen is me, because all these emotions are a part of me, all these emotions make me, myself. Because without these emotions my life would be a mere circumstance.
