No crease or folds or strikethroughs
can ruin the first page of your new diary.
Nightmares that seem endless,
when people borrow stationery and don’t return them.
The nib of your pen stressed and blotting the page,
leaves you distressed, as a friend tries to write with a fountain pen.
You chew your nails into nearly half,
when a friend expresses her desire to take your stabilo home.
Neither can you say no nor can you tell them off,
because - friend clause applied.
If you relate to this, I’m sure the papyrophiliac in you has kicked in right from the first word of the poem.
No matter how much you hoard, it is never going to be enough. In spite of it eating into your wardrobe space, you will still make room for that cute eraser, myriad differently shaped sticky notes, and artsy diaries and planners that have to be sheltered by you. When the time comes to use it, you find most of them to be either too nice or too fancy to be used at all, so instead, you purchase simpler ones and then land up piling them again with the precious lot. This is a vicious cycle.
So what happens to all this stationery? When the special moment comes for each designated pen/notepad/diary/highlighter/eraser/clicker pencils, they shall get used and, most of the time, they may not get used at all. For instance, I’ve a hand-stitched diary with typographical references, which was gifted to me by my father in 2012 when I was still in college. To this day, I’ve been unable to use it. Each time I open my trunk of preciously guarded stationery; I carefully flip through the pages without creasing them, feel the pages and put it right back where it was kept.
Thank god, we are in the digital age! We type more than we write. Imagine, if you were in Jane Austen’s day, when instead of putting pen to paper, you would just put off writing altogether in making a choice of the stationery that needs to be used. There would be no Sense & Sensibility, there would only be Sense & Sensibility in buying Stationery.