Richard Stupart

Those first blank pages are intimidating. Judgmental. As though the entire book might be spoiled with the careless stroke of a pen. As with any superstition, I don’t believe it. Not rationally anyway. But I go and buy six of my favourite pens. Just in case. Don’t go to the ball without a tuxedo, y’know?

This shall be a writing book. Neither a journal, nor the essential notes and lists off which an efficient world feeds. This shall be a space for narrative. The forest in which the metaphors run, play, and sleep. No responsibility for order – that straightjacket of linearity. Stream of consciousness is welcome here. Its dirty little paws can run the length of the clean, crisp pages.

I hadn’t ever done that before – used a pen until the ink ran dry.  I’d known it was possible, but had never been that loyal to my writing instruments before

These paws have run before. Hard and long. Ninety thousand wordprints in the silent white once – until the pen finally ran out. Exhausted, spent, unable to weave another memory. To capture imperfectly in that black ink another thought, another moment. I hadn’t ever done that before – used a pen until the ink ran dry.  I’d known it was possible, but had never been that loyal to my writing instruments before. I’d take their best and leave them lost for others to finish. Or I would chew, chew them until they died. Plastic bones broken and expiring in a pool of oily black stories that might have been told. Now lost in a thick, black cacophony.

That pen was different. Beyond an empty plastic cartridge, grew my affection for its tribe.  Writing would just not feel the same after all those pages shared, were it not for the way you teased and pushed my fingers. So for this book, these pages, I sought out its descendants back in the craft shop from which it hailed. Once a nation of hundreds, six remaining souls looked back at me. For much time has passed since I first pressed their grandfather to paper.

And so, I took them all. A last family of ink and hand, to hold still on these new pages the soft pitter patter of the things that matter. Those skittish creatures that scamper through this thing we call life. Pen and hand, we chase them down together.