“How long has it been?”
“I don’t know, five months?”
Five months it had been, since its voyage into the wintry horizon, without a care of what the world outside of it would think. With all its sharpened lead and glory, the pencil lay there untouched. An empty, snow coloured canvas placed not farther than a few inches next to it, patiently awaited the imprint of something. Anything.
Only once every two weeks did she allow the pencil to dance around the paper’s margins, about to embark on a literary journey before finding its place back on the same woody surface of her bedside table, every single time.
“Come on, pencil! Translate what she’s thinking, you’ve done this before.”
This evening marked another day, after fourteen other monotonous ones, wherein she sat herself down, accompanied by a decent level of motivation to write just a little more than the thirty words she previously jotted down. Even so, the pencil in her hand simply couldn’t write, for her world was as white as the paper she stared at.
“You had one job: expressing her thoughts. How hard can that be? You literally do it all the time.”
“Oh yeah? You try being a pencil and then you’ll realize the incomprehensible complexities of the human brain. Even then, you couldn’t possibly understand it, god knows I can’t. All you do is just exist there, showing off your vast, empty… space. What role do you play in her inspiration, huh?”
“Um, I literally exist as the creative outlet? Of course I can inspire art; I’m literally art myself.” “Oh please, I’d rather you didn’t further interrupt her already distorted thought process.”
“Ugh, okay Scrooge. I wish I had eyes to roll at you.”
‘Yeah, me too.”
The pencil was engaged in another thoughtless dance, barely tracing a letter of the alphabet, accepting that today might just be like the others; that today, she would accomplish thirty more words for the story she’s been writing for five whole months. The paper stayed still, in its designated spot, and waiting was all it did and could do. The pencil roved around in fear, of not being good enough, not being able to articulate a word she was thinking, again. It failed her again, it thought. Her grip over the pencil tightened as she scribbled in circles, then squares, then squiggles, her face hiding in her other hand as she couldn’t find it in herself to do what her mind originally set out to do.
“What if I can’t do it? The world will hate this story, the world hates pencils. Everyone hates pencils. I’d be writing an essay’s worth of ideas if she just tried to focus, but what am I to do? I’m only a pencil at the end of it all. What can people write about pencils?”
Silence resumed its vigil for a moment’s time, and the ruckus in her head came to an abrupt halt. The ear-stabbing cacophony in her brain ceased, and she eyed both objects, closely.
“What…can’t people write about pencils? And paper? Oh my god, oh my god!” “What? What?! Did you figure out what she’s thinking?
“She’s going to write a story about us!”
“About us? What do you mean?”
“You said so earlier, we are art! A paper can be art, and so can a pencil. Her experience of this constraint, of writer’s block, led her to think about writing about writer’s block, in the form of conversation between us!”
“No way, that’s genius! Did we inspire her? Rather, did you communicate that to her?”
In an interesting turn of events, the inspiration she chased after, stopped, and waited for her to catch up. And well, she found it; through the very tools with which she attempted to express herself. One potential idea after the other, she engraved something onto the paper, only this time, with a comfortable grasp of the mighty pencil, letting her mind wander as she simply…wrote
…and just writing was all she ever wanted to do.
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