My pilot G2 1.0 millimeter black pen. If my life were an inanimate object it would be that. Not just any old pen because I’d like to think I’m more special than that. Specifically a Pilot G2 pen because the Pilot company produces a variety of pens, not just the G2. That’s where my family comes in. They can be the rest of the pens, any pen they choose. Like the Pilot Easytouch, or the Pilot Vball, or even the Pilot G6, which is just a bad version of the Pilot G2 if we’re being honest. But me, I’m the Pilot G2 in 1.0 millimeter ink to be specific which is way better than 0.7 millimeter ink because it’s just a bit thicker, if we’re being realistic.

But my life – it’s the perfect pen, but everyone’s life is a pen and we all have the ability to write our own stories because that’s just how it goes. Everyone also chooses to be a specific color pen, for various reasons. I choose to be a black pen because everyone likes a good black pen. But I’ve met a handful of people in life that are all different colors of pens. I’ve met a lot of blue pens, green pens, crazy colored pens, and even red pens. I never noticed everyone had a true pen color until I went to college. It’s like everyone developed their true color the more time we spent using actual pens. I was able to see that people had their own agendas and stories to tell.

The problem with people writing their own stories is that sometimes those people don’t care to write over, scratch out, or scribble all over your story just to make theirs perfect, not caring if they mess up yours or not. So, sometimes in life you have to cut out the number of pens you carry in your backpack. Take this for example, when you were younger you were given a pencil pouch to put all your pens and pencils in – the more pens and pencils you had the cooler you were. But now, in college, the majority of students start off the semester with a couple of old pens they find at home and are lucky to keep them throughout the entire semester. We’ve learned better than to carry a whole bunch of pens at once with the expectation of keeping them all. All this goes for people just the same; I’ve learned, in the hardest of ways, that sometimes it’s better off only keeping one or two pens on you because you don’t run the risk of their ink spilling all over your story.

My mom always taught me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, I should not say anything at all. I’m not one to judge whether or not I picked that habit up completely, but I would like to say that I tried my best. This was the age I realized that we are pens; we can write whatever story we like. Around the ages I was in grade school and high school, I was very curious what other people were writing about and what they were doing, you know, like the majority of most immature kids. But as I got older I realized people not only wanted to write their story, but wanted to mess yours up or rewrite yours at the same time – the red pens. There are a lot of red pen people in the world; they’re the ones that sabotaged your first talk with your crush, the ones that spoke bad about you in front of others, and the ones that read your message without replying to it, or in my case, someone that hangs out with your ex-boyfriend that pretends it never happened when you ask about it. Red pen people are anyone that hinder you from writing your best and honest story.

I’ve come to know a lot of people who seem like black pens like me, or even pink pens with the happiest of spirits, but sometimes you need to watch out for pink pens the most because they may seem like the best person, or someone that could never hurt you, but they’re usually the quickest to turn red. But sometimes, life is just life and you can’t help yourself by making poor choices in who your friends are. I’ve been friends with a lot of red pen people for the sake of hoping that, with time, we would all mature to be people with the best intentions, but life doesn’t always turn out that way. People can either change their colors and be the best version of themselves, or they can always be the red pen.

But again, it’s not so simple – I can only see people through my own lens and cannot control how others view me or the world around them, but from my perspective, I am a Pilot G2 1.0 mm in black ink because that’s just the person I hope to be I hope to be in life, but in someone else’s story I am the Bic 1.0 mm pen in blood red ink. No matter what color pen we are, we all try writing our best stories because in the end, all we see is ourselves. We see pages and pages behind us of a story we once told in red ink, but we also look forward to see empty pages of story waiting to be told, in any color we want.