Pencils past

Friday Fragment #11

Spirals of pigment-edged shavings fall into the pot below her doughy hands. She sharpens the pencil to a point and then holds it a few inches in front of her nose, beaming proudly. She lowers a finger gently onto the brightly coloured spike and smiles, then turns her gaze towards me to elicit the same response. ‘Ouch’, I mock-exclaim and she chuckles. She pushes the pencil back into the metal barrel to repeat her happiness and I watch as she rotates and planes the yellow stick once again. She reaches for a purple pencil from the tin on the table and holds it next to the shortened yellow stub. She locks her grip around this new subject and begins to twirl it around; a turnstile flip between the mechanical lift and drop of her fingers and the piston punch of her thumb. A simple happiness from many years ago. Occasionally, your young adult children are once again your young three- and four-year-old children – which is to say they once more become themselves and you once more become yourself, and these moments, as now dissolves into then, will floor you. And your love for them in those moments will be inexpressibly complex and will burn inside your chest and punch and pull at your gut. And as they focus on their revision and the annotating of their texts and the cartwheeling of their pencils, you are faltering just a few feet away from them. You will try to keep grasp and cling onto that beautiful explosion for longer – that joy and intensity of meaning and realisation – but that part of you and them is already adrift, receding and then lost. No fingers, short or long, and no hands, doughy, or slender like hers now, or large and ageing like mine, will be able to hold onto it. But those feelings and colours will be whet to that sweet-pain ‘ouch’ point again. It occurs to me that to define is to sharpen and reduce something down, to make that thing as clean as possible, so that you might express yourself with clarity and draw and add colour to the world around you.

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