Dear Sir.

Dear Sir,

I accidentally took your pen. I took it and I put it straight away into my bag and and I am using it now to write you this sincere apology. I thought to put it in the mail and I went so far as to use it to address the pen-sized package. But when I sealed it up twice over with some extra strength packing tape – I realized, with some guilt and a little twinge of some version of nervous anxiety, that I had left your pen utterly out of the package. It sits on my desk ominously, fixed in its place next to a piece of very very blank drawing paper. I have since, I confess, used your pen to make various drawings. If it is any consolation, and I refuse to take comfort in the possibility of a thing I can not be certain of, I have drawn quite a few pictures of you. Many have been of your face, a few have been of your ears, as those are such delightfully complicated little snails of the human body. But your hands, I admit, were much too difficult. It is not just your hands sir, complex as they are with the details of the work you have done and undone (or, in some cases, if I may be frank, have not done at all.) But rather, it is hands in general that many artists have found most difficult. From Renoir to Michelangelo, I would venture to guess. Not that I mean to make a comparison sir! For certain you would be safer comparing me to a thing that lives beneath a rock. But I would be remiss in not admitting that your pen seems to elevate me to a higher expectation of myself and my abilities and even the attempt at drawing a hand, or hands, as it were – exceeds any other of my past artistic endeavors.  When it is in my hands I am simply better than myself. Maybe it is due to the times you have held it with your own complicated fingers? Designing your life with it and addressing people who have the means to change the world? In any case, it is imbued with something. It has been marinating in some power and when it sits on my table or desk or by my bed, I am surprised it does not sit up or walk about, for the way it seems to address me, so directly, asking me to consider it – to consider picking it up, consider bettering every part of everything I have ever known.
Sir, let me come back to my point. I have taken your pen. Even now it is pressed between three fingers on my left hand. A kind of sin, that left-handedness, as you have said. Sin in sin, it seems for, as I have confessed, the pen is not even my own. Nor have I paid for it. But Sir, if I did see money in your pocket or your beautiful watch on the table, I would not dare to breathe on either. That which belongs to you is yours and yours alone. Somehow I manage to know that and to know this: I wanted your pen. I wanted it more than anything – to feel it pressed into my palm and to see it shining in my ordinary apartment. My apartment that is always either over or under heated and in which I shiver and sweat on a far too regular basis. Where there are no rugs or flowers or plants, but only a wood floor that catches your socks with snags and collects entire bales of hair and dust in its corners. Where clothes, new once to someone else, but old and worn here, seem to multiply while simultaneously falling into pieces not quite qualified for wearing and at once not ugly enough to call a “rag.” The pen is unaffected by the odor of meals made in haste by someone of my meager means or by coffee left too long on the burner. In the bare bulb garishness of the light fixture for which I can afford no shade, the pen only shines like an object modeling for the picture of the perfect example of the most perfect object. It pays no mind to the ticking clock, the hissing heat, the jamming slams and clacks of the things that pass and shake my window. It sits peacefully. Only waiting. But  I do want to say sir, and I say this with much reluctance for I know that I couldn’t be sure of such a thing (how could I?) I believe with all of my heart (which is admittedly a small object, due to all of the falling apart and coming together that it has suffered. Pieces have been lost, surely, in the effort. It’s a lot to ask of a muscle and what with the daily grind and pressure of the life that I walk around in. I try to forgive its feeble remnants.) But still, I believe with every awkwardly shaped, yet resilient, piece of my still beating heart -that your pen, in finding its way to my humble lodgings (and by “finding its way” I acknowledge the use of a figure of speech and care not to, in any way, shrink the fullness of my guilty actions) – even still, as it has found its way to my home, it seems to have resigned itself or… perhaps I should be bold and declare what I believe to be true and say: It has been quite pleased, your pen, to have found itself here. I write this entire letter with neither pause nor cross out and for this reason I am certain your pen conspires with me to stay in my possession – to declare itself “mine” and recognize that perhaps I even belong to the pen in the same way it belongs to me. I assure you that it is almost more of a partnership between the pen and I. “Ownership” is too declarative and rigid, leaving no room for  the kind of sincerity and admiration that passes between us on what has become a daily and sometimes hourly exchange. Sir, the pen was yours for sometime. You found it in the store, recognized its potential, and purchased it in an honorable way. But I do ask you – dare I implore you- to consider it possible that your pen belongs, in its way, here with me. Is it at all possible that fate joined us for tea on that beautiful February morning wherein I took it upon myself to slip it in my pocket?
I appreciate your time and your consideration in this matter and I am grateful for the time you have taken to read my confessions and declarations. I welcome the opportunity for some relief from the guilty feelings associated with my actions. But I admit that I am also willing to accept guilt as a part of the consequences of acting wrongly, while  having no desire to change the past.

 

Humbly yours.