For some, a pen is a tool for writing, spilling some ink on paper to disseminate information.
For others, it’s a way of life.
My romance with stationary, particularly fountain pens, began in class 3 when my mom took me to a sprawling stationery store. The 8-year-old me was enamoured just by the size of it. The colours, the variety of pens, the glistening painting notebooks stacked harmoniously, the stuff in different shapes and sizes that I couldn’t decipher yet, everything came together to create a unicorn world with rainbow cakes and tea.
Let me give you visuals of my love for stationery or rather what it has grown into.
Coming back to the stationary. That was the day my mom handed over a fountain pen in my hands in an attempt to shift me from writing with a pencil to now with a pen, a fountain pen.
At first, it wasn’t the easiest ride.
There were times when the ink just won’t reach the nib.
There were times when there was just too much of it.
But once I got a hang of it, I wrote with flair.
The other day, I came across a poem called ‘The Fountain Pen’
It reads:
Poet's pen--
That is what a purpose of a fountain pen has been and will remain to be.
As 90s kids, all of us have used fountain pens. For a lot of us, it was the first pen that we ever used. That was the same time when we were leaving pencils, to fill notebooks with, behind and learning how to use pens. This was also the time that we felt we have grown up a little. Young adults. There were kids in school who were junior to us. That is always such an empowering feeling, wasn’t it?
Fountains pens came along a little problem. Erasers didn’t work that efficiently anymore. A mistake was very visible on a notebook and so we practiced. Well, some of us did. We practiced to attain a page in the notebook without any mistakes and in the best handwriting possible.
Some of us took time out to pick the fountain pen best suited to our liking to produce the best results. (Yes, we have done it and we are proud of it.) We then took out time to write notes beautifully, getting each stroke of that perfect fountain pen right, so that sometimes even when the content wasn’t so great, handwriting shall win. It was an art form for all of us and it was therapeutic AF.
As we grew older,
We now live in a world where pens have become a rarity.
We are computer beings who write on their respective machines, which are available to them at all points of time, unlike a pen that is most likely not there. In an era of texting and stylists, I try my best to go back to using a fountain pen whenever I can. Nothing can match of the joy of filling that ink pot.
The fountain pen is now reduced to occasional spills of bills, scribbles, and doodles.
Some of us, though, still write the story of our lives with it because somehow, it feels more familiar. It carries a comfort of an old friend who has seen us grow not only physically but also in our thoughts, as we wrote about it. It harbor a sense of sticking to your roots because even though progress is something we all seek, we need to be well-aware of where we are coming from.
As I end this romantic tale, I’d like to share an inkling of a fellow poet about what they feel about a fountain pen.
You kissed me on my cheeks