The Fountain Pen

I held the broken remains of my prized fountain pen and tried to remember how it met its final undoing.

In the months before Cindy’s aneurysm, I remember being on the verge of a semi-nervous breakdown. Although, the reasons for it seem insignificant now, I do recall a period this past summer when a combination of events had left me quite despondent. My job was consuming almost every free thought I had, I was missing Cindy (since she was working a 40-hour week, going to nursing school full-time, and constantly driving to Virginia Beach to take care of her family), and there was a lump in the back of my neck that Cindy kept telling me to have checked out.

I’d drive home from work most nights crying at the wheel and then try to pull myself together before seeing Cindy. After all, she was the one living several conflicting and back-breaking lives. If anyone deserved to lose it, it was her. But if you knew Cindy intimately, you would know that she rarely, if ever, cried over her own life. She’d cry about the unexplainable illness her sister battled, the stresses that her mom had to deal with, and sometimes she’d even cry over total strangers if they were the victim of an injustice. But, she refused to ever feel sorry for her own life. I admired her for this fortitude at the same time I resented her for it.

Because I did not want to burden Cindy with my troubles, I kept a lot close to myself. After all, when Cindy came home, she did not deserve to return to an emotional mess. Sometimes Cindy would not get home until 8 or 10pm at night and then crack open a textbook to study for a test. She slept maybe, at most, 5 hours a night. I begged her to quit her job and told her that I could support us both, but she would not listen to me.

One late night, while Cindy was at a study group, I could not sleep and decided to write Cindy a love letter. I used to write Cindy notes all the time. I‘d leave them on her pillow, pack them in her lunch bag, stick them to the bathroom mirror, or place them on her car's dashboard. And I always tried to use the pen that she had given me in the very beginning of our relationship.

It was a classic silver and black Aurora fountain pen with cerulean blue ink. When she gave it to me, she said, “Every Italian writer should have the best Italian pen. And now when you write, you will always think of me.”

She was right. I always thought of her when I touched that pen. I thought of her that night as I grabbed the pen to begin my epistle. However, right as I was about to begin writing, a wave of sadness and anger washed over me. I thought about my stressful work life, about the plans we delayed for school, about being alone in the bed, about Cindy having this schedule until December, and about Cindy never being able to sit still or accept help. All this rage rose up through my body and I threw the pen against the wall. I never wrote the love letter for Cindy that night.

I must have forgotten about the pen the next morning because I did not touch it again until last week when I going through some things in the bedroom. Located next to some books on the floor was my pen--now broken into 2 pieces. Somehow the ink reservoir escaped injury and did not splatter blue ink across the floor. My attempts to mend the pen were futile. I have placed the wreckage in its leather case for safe keeping until I figure out what I want to do with the remains.



P.S. The neck thing turned out to be harmless swollen lymph nodes.