You have a fountain pen, black-lacquered, light rippling over its body as it turns, the line it lays down clean and effortless.
At first sight you marveled at it, paid dearly for it, and guarded it like a treasure.
Most people keep a single pen and go looking for a new one only when it breaks, yet you kept several spares besides, differing in pattern and in the breadth of their nibs.
The nib bore a dark-gold figure; as you wrote, the ink glimmered along its delicate circling path, lustrous as a jewel, its fragrance drifting off the page. Splendid and fine as it was, in time you could not help finding it a little monotonous, and often took turns writing with several pens. Yet from the day it came to you, there had been a hairline crack at the root of the nib, almost too faint to see. Each time you set it down and picked up another pen to scrawl away at your ease, the crack crept a little further, until in the darkness beneath the cap it had spread across a whole face of the nib.
The nib was on the point of giving way. You seemed not to notice, still pressing hard as you wrote, and into the scratch of nib against paper there crept a faint hum. As the ink was drawn in and given out, the crack drank its fill of the thick black liquid; the decaying rim grew looser and looser, as though the next second would see it break outright.
Then one day, while you bent over the desk with another pen, setting down the world as you saw it, the nib beside you, under the black curtain of its cap, split without a sound and fell away. A long while later, when you uncapped that black gleam once more, you looked at the shattered nib, and said nothing.
You stood there numb, as if something soft in your heart had taken a savage stab.
You pushed aside all the other pens. Bright-patterned as they were, each with its own merits, you knew they were not what you wanted.
You decided to take it out and have the nib replaced.
The whole way was a riot of blossom, voices sounding without pause from one end of the street to the other, carriages and traffic streaming past; but you stared straight ahead, clutching the pen hidden in your pocket until a film of sweat rose on your palm. When you reached the craftsman’s shop, you felt for your pocket.
It was empty.
The pen was lost somewhere in that endless splendor.
You looked back in a daze, then shuffled home in your slippers. You took a cold shower, gave a little laugh — only a pen, after all — and then, stiffly, a touch comically, gathered up the pens of every color scattered across the floor.
Some days later, on a night of driving rain, you walked home alone under an umbrella. Inside the stairwell, as you closed it, something came to mind; you drew your notebook and pen from the inner pocket of your padded coat, and just as you set yourself to write, you froze.
It struck you, all at once, that the black-lacquered pen was gone.
The corridor light was a warm yellow. Climbing the stairs, your breath suddenly came short, and you slid slowly down along the corner of the wall to the floor.
That instant was long — longer than a lifetime.
Like a scorpion’s sting on the hand.
Like a dagger driven along the line of your heart.
Like a dull, heavy blow to the back of the head.
You lay down in gloom and shut your eyes in vexation; they burned hot at the rims, and you felt two warm streams, unlike the cold rain, run down your cheeks.
There were still fine essays you had never inscribed with it, a handsome signature you had never flourished with it, the small matters of daily life you had never set down with it, stray drops of inspiration you had never recorded with it.
It was the regret of a whole life missed, the despair of an endless river of remorse bursting its dikes and storming the city.
Your phone began to ring — the ringtone was 毛不易’s 盛夏[1].:
Driving past solitude and splendor (驶过寂寞或繁华), do the ones who once were young ever think of me?
Then come back, come back — someone is waiting for you.
Someone is waiting for you to finish the sentence you left half-said.
You wiped your tears and answered the call.
“Hello — we’ve found a black fountain pen. We traced the model number inside the cap to the pen shop and got your contact details there. Would you have time to come and collect it?”
Many years later.
One hazy golden afternoon, the midsummer wind came through the wide-open window and brushed over the papers on the desk, setting the pages faintly rustling.
You took off your reading glasses, and an aged hand set down a pen grown just as old and worn. It lay pressed upon the gently stirring pages; the dark-gold nib, though touched with a little ink, still showed in the sunlight a surface smooth and without flaw.
The black lacquer of the pen had chipped away here and there, yet it kept a luster that caught the eye.
With a mild, aged smile on your face, you slowly closed your eyes.
Lost and found again, it had kept you company through a whole life.
Thank it for seeing you through the long years, for driving with you past solitude and splendor.
Thank you.
[1]. A tender melody that belongs to time