When My Pen Found Me Again

I stopped writing the day my father died.

Not because the words were gone—words never leave you entirely—but because every time I tried, the sentences bled into grief. My notebooks smelled like hospital antiseptic and cheap coffee, my pen scratching out fragments that felt too raw to finish.

For years, I told myself I was too busy for writing.

There was always work to do, errands to run, people to please. I convinced myself adulthood had no room for scribbles in the margins or midnight journal entries under a blanket fort.

But the truth was simpler:

I was afraid.

The last time I wrote, I’d been a different person. A girl with a father who read her stories at night. A girl who believed in happy endings. When he left, the act of putting words on paper felt like carving open a wound I had no bandages for.

It happened on a Wednesday, years later.

The sky was a dull sheet of grey, the kind that makes you wonder if the sun has quit its job. I was cleaning my apartment, tossing old boxes into piles—keep, donate, trash—when I found it.

A shoebox.

The faded cardboard was soft at the edges, the lid taped twice over, as if my past self had known it would need protecting. Inside were little folded pieces of paper—tiny notes I used to pass to friends in school, poems scribbled in margins, and one battered notebook covered in stickers of cats and glittery stars.

I sat on the floor and opened it.

The handwriting inside was mine, but not. Slanted letters, uneven loops, the dot over every “i” perfectly round. The first page read:

I write so I won’t forget the way things feel right now.

I remembered writing that. It was a summer afternoon, my window open, the smell of jasmine climbing in on a breeze. I’d been thirteen, sitting cross-legged on my bed, a cheap blue pen in hand. I hadn’t thought about publication, audience, or whether anyone would like what I wrote. I just wanted to remember.

I don’t know how long I sat there reading. Pages of half-formed stories, strange metaphors, diary entries about my crush on a boy who once lent me a pencil. I read letters to my future self, promises that I would always keep writing—promises I had broken without even noticing.

Somewhere between those pages, I felt her—the girl I had been—slip her small hand into mine. She didn’t ask why I’d abandoned her. She didn’t scold. She just sat with me, patient, as if waiting for me to remember how to hold a pen.

That night, I found one. A cheap ballpoint from the back of a kitchen drawer. It felt foreign in my hand, heavier than I remembered. I took a fresh notebook from the shelf—one I’d bought years ago and never touched because I thought my words wouldn’t be worthy of its clean pages.

I wrote one sentence. Then another. The pen moved slowly, haltingly, like a bird testing its wings after a long winter. But soon, the lines began to flow.

I didn’t write about my father. Not directly. But he was there, in the curve of every word. In the way I described the smell of rain, the way the kitchen light reflected off the floor, the way some memories sit in the chest like smooth stones you can’t throw away.

I wrote until my wrist ached.

The next morning, the world looked different. Not brighter, not magically fixed, but textured—like someone had adjusted the focus on a lens I didn’t know had gone blurry. I noticed the sound of my neighbor’s wind chimes. I noticed how the barista at the café drew a tiny smiley face on my cup.

I started carrying a pen everywhere. I wrote on receipts, on napkins, in the notes app on my phone when paper wasn’t around. The words weren’t brilliant—most were messy, repetitive, even cliché—but they were mine.

The more I wrote, the more I remembered: writing isn’t about perfection. It’s about preservation. About catching moments before they slip into the ocean of forgetting.

Weeks later, I went back to the shoebox.

This time, I added something new: the pages I’d been filling since that Wednesday. I placed them gently on top of the old notebook, as if tucking my past and present selves into the same bed.

I thought of my thirteen-year-old self again. Of how she would smile knowing we’d found each other. Of how she would understand that sometimes, life takes you away from the things you love—not because they stop mattering, but because they matter too much.

People ask me sometimes why I write again now, after all these years. I tell them it’s because my pen found me.

But that’s not the whole truth.

The truth is, I found her—the girl who believed in stories, who believed that words could hold feelings like jars could hold fireflies. I found her in a dusty box on a grey Wednesday, and she hasn’t let go of my hand since.

And this time, I’m not letting go of hers either.