The pen cap that dreamt of becoming a pen

Say one day you wake up and you realize you’re a pen cap.

Your whole life was lived in pursuit of becoming a writer. You try and try, and even though at times you wrote some pretty successful pieces, you find yourself unwittingly better at protecting the writing utensil than at being the writing utensil itself.

At first, you ignored this. You decided that life is something you can control. You decided that you won’t give in to this recurring attitude. You’re more than what your maker set out for you. You’re a pen. Not a pen cap! A pen writes! A pen has ink and is able to use that to convey ideas! You want to convey ideas. You want to change people’s lives with your words. What the hell is a pen cap?! I mean sure, no reasonable pen can survive more than a week without its trusty cap. Not to mention how beautiful some pen caps are. A pen cap has the little clip so that the pen can be attached onto a pocket or a page. Still, you want to be a pen!

Unsatisfied with your new realization, you started working on changing yourself. You got online and read articles about how that other pen cap became a pen. The research shows that pens can choose to be pen caps and vice versa. Nothing is set in stone.

This made you immensely happy. You bought those books that teach you how to become a pen — written by a barely qualified pen cap life coach who has spent his life studying how to be a pen, but never truly penned anything in his life — and you got ready for the new challenge.

Days go by and life has never been so good! “I’m a pen!” you say into the mirror as you brush your teeth. You’ve been writing a few articles recently and that has made you quite proud. Things are truly great! You’ve even been dating a new and exciting pen cap, to make matters all the better. Still, something’s not quite right. You frequently find yourself putting writing off or finding excuses for not finishing your latest piece. This perplexes and irritates you.

When you’re surrounded by the pens and pen caps that you’re most comfortable with, you not only naturally exercise your pen capping abilities — you’re truly happy. In those moments, you’re good at being a pen cap — fucking good at it for that matter. The friends in your life that know you best, love you for being a pen cap and life is easy around them. You wish that the rest of the world can see you at your prime in this way, laughing at your ridiculous jokes and actually appreciating the very uncool act of capping pens. If you weren’t a pen cap, you would have never met that faithful bunch, and when you compare yourself to some other pens you know and look at their social circles, you crave none of it. Alas, there’s an inherent beauty to being a pen that you aren’t finding in being a pen cap.

You go to bed after a pen party and you’re uncertain as hell about your decisions. What is it about the pens you actually want? Is it the ink? Is it the fact that they’re the ones that others look up to? Is it that they are able to write beautifully? Maybe it’s that they can write at all. You start to think really deeply about this.

Thinking makes matters worse, but you keep at it. You think and you think some more. You think until sleeping becomes nearly impossible to achieve. You think yourself into a petrifying fear that stops you right in your tracks. You are now unable to be a pen and you start sucking at being a pen cap.

You find it hard to wake up because it means facing another day with barely any identity of your own besides your brand. Then right before you go to bed again, you look back at that day and dread the fact that you did none of the things you were supposed to do if you were to ever become a pen. This becomes routine. It’s tiring. Tiring in a way that only an existential dilemma can invoke. It’s a feeling that transcends both the physical and mental being; a tiredness that comes from being so entirely disconnected from the world. It’s tiring because the very earth underneath your feet is not there. You’re constantly floating, trying your best to keep grounded — like being underwater in a pool and trying to stand up straight at the bottom of the deep end.

Suddenly, you find approaching people gets more difficult. When they ask you what you are or what you do, you mumble that you’re an aspiring pen but were born a pen cap. You say that because it’s a comforting answer, an answer that gives you hope and allows you to keep going, but you know that deep down the former is false and the latter is merely an undeniable truth.

Eventually, you stop dreaming of becoming a pen because it was too exhausting, and you suppressed being a pen cap for so long that you’re no longer that either.

This is the ultimate limbo. Being undefined, feeling undefinable and being incapable of embracing the uncertainty.

You start questioning everything. Should you pursue being a pen? Should you embrace being a pen cap — even if it means accepting certain traits about yourself that you meant to eradicate? Above all, if the very traits that make you a pen cap are getting in the way of your journey to becoming a pen, can a pen cap ever truly be a pen, or is this the kind of dream sold to pen caps in order to keep them functional?