People Are Like Pencils
People are like pencils; honed and whole at first, with a core of potential words hidden beneath a sheath of laminate, a hard-gloss finish in any and every color. People are like pencils; sharpened to a lethal point in a moment of whirring tumult, a point that might prick blood in the half-thought of haste, a point that cuts across yawns of ambiguous blankness in precise, stringent lines that structure and rectify, cross-out and destroy. People are like pencils; their words might be erased, but not the actual imprints they etch on the surfaces they touch; when their sentences are gone, the ghosts of their sentiments are left behind as pocks and scars and smudges and particles of dust.
People are like pencils; unable to draw the world in gradients until life has worn them down a bit. People are like pencils; their creations costs them something–their duration–the length of their lives, and the more intense their application, the more rapid their erosion.
People are like pencils; they all have points, unless they don’t, in which case they once did–which is to say that they’ve left their point behind, somewhere else, perhaps in the margins of a book or on their church’s community calendar. Or maybe they fumbled in their execution and their point snapped. And it’s taken them years to smooth down that fracture, to wear it away until it isn’t the first thing you notice about them.
My grandmother was like a pencil. All around her scrawled the loopy manifestation of her life’s work–her children, her children’s children, her recipes, her small reminders that repeated themselves until they were mantras from my mother’s mouth, from my own mouth. She was dulled by her years, a nub of her former self, a shrunken remembrance of her glory and glamour. But she was not without a certain angularity, a sharpness that took her at a moment’s notice and turned her fuzzy mind into vivid wit. It was a variable lucidity, apt to pivot in and out of focus, but it was there. You could see it was there–sometimes–when she looked at you in a small pocket of silence in the family’s conversation, and winked.
People are like pencils; you use them to write.