Attention, Attention! 

For all these 
I need a medication: 
Unreal scenarios, forgotten melodies, 
Nasty arguments, bitter memories.
 
No more, please. 
I need a meditation. 
Unnamed emotions, tears, regrets and doubts. 
Around the corner, a mental collapse. 

But now I can’t. 
Sit quiet, Attention! 
I must attend 
Another distraction.

You are

Weak

Lazy

Spoiled

Narrow-minded

Incompetent

Hated.

None hurts more

Than

Irrelevant.

Meaningless.

Not needed.

When disposed of

I just pray to be

Recyclable.

Everybody (maybe apart from new, tech-savvy generation) has struggled in their life with a pen problem, when there was too much ink left in their pen to throw it away, but not enough to write effortlessly. The pen problem happens suddenly and always in the worst moment – during an exam or an important meeting, when you forgot to bring a spare pen.

You are scribbling down notes when suddenly, the fluency of your handwriting gets disrupted. You first approach the problem with an attitude of a five-year-old who is asking parents for a dog. ‘If I am persistent enough, it will work’. So, you hold on to your pen and press it harder against the piece of paper, hoping that it will somehow help. And then, yes! –precious words appear on the paper. It seems that the ink tube is not completely empty.

But your excitation quickly evaporates, when some of the words become partial, changing ‘farther’ to ‘fart’ and ‘assumption’ to ‘ass’. You keep rewriting the same letters while your levels of frustration peak. After a few seconds, you have dozens of blank lines in front of you, created by the force of your hand (and anger), not by the ink.

Then, you try a different technique. On a margin, you’re warming up your pen through drawing lines up and down, down and up, right to left, left to right. After a while, it seems that the pen is working again. Time to fill in those blank lines in the shape of ‘her’ and ‘umption’! But then, you realize this task is impossible since the lines reject to have anything to do with the ink.

That’s when you decide to forget about those unfortunate, uncompleted words and start writing another paragraph. The clear outline of initial letters gives you a new wave of hope. However, soon the situation gets a whole lot worse than it was before because now, every other letter is just a ghost.

Some people will try to use the pen until it gets empty. They will repeat all these steps again and again, ending up with useless, half-empty notes. Others, discouraged, will give up and throw the pen to a bin after the first round.

Neither of these attitudes is correct. And neither is wrong.

One thing to remember though is that for some, it is too late to buy a new ink tube or too difficult to use a tablet. Don’t judge.

Em.