Describe one simple thing you do that brings joy to your life.

Dear Bic,

Merriam-Webster defines joy as:

(n): 1. The emotion evoked by well-being, success or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires (2) the expression or exhibition of such emotion, (3) a state of happiness or felicity, (4) a source or cause of delight

Merriam-Webster

For some thirty-odd years, you’ve shown me what joy looks and feels like. As if it were yesterday, I recall sliding your thin,clear plastic body between my fingers and putting your ink on paper. We wrote a “Mickey” book together, the first of many in the series. When words were stuck inside my head, I’d swirl you around on the edge of the paper, practicing a dozen autograph styles for that day, somewhere in the magical land known as when I grow up, where the stories would live on The New York Times best-seller list (or Oprah’s bookshelves). With the passage of the years, your blue ink smeared across my knuckles and the pages, moving from i’s dotted with hearts to doctor worthy scribbles only I can read. Your blue caps have been chewed on, used to dig dirt out from under my fingernails, lost between the seat cracks in a dozen cars and, always, sought after.

Fancy pens are too thick to hold and others aren’t as smooth. A simple pleasure is watching the ink in your case diminish as I hammer out thousands of pages of writing; few but you can offer that streak of joy. Pencils are too needy; they can’t compete with your infinite sharpness and their scratching noises against the page doesn’t help. Only you, Bic, are steadfast in offering precision and smoothness; only you have proven you can withstand the beatings of an insomniac capable of writing thousands of pages every year. You’ve never disappointed or broken your promise to “write first time, every time” and your consistency made all the difference. You’ve always (sometimes begrudgingly) obliged different mediums: whether it was traditional notebooks, paper napkins, or my skin you never failed to record for eternity my thoughts. Standing in front of a hundred different options—I could choose one that carries multiple colors of ink, or ones that promise to have the finest tips–I will always choose only you.

On the nights where the words were painful and tears fell onto the pages, smearing your ink into round blobs, you offered a way to turn those tears into bursts of joy. You’ve seen all the parts of me: the silly teenage girl playing games of MASH in the corner of the pages, the brave me revealing how I felt for the whole world to see, the scared me crafting the most painful words so I didn’t have to say them out loud, and you’ve acted as the portal for moving me out of my world and into a safer one.

Two of you lay on my night table now, atop a college ruled notebook, and three more of you lay patiently in the desk drawer. In the middle of the night recently, I awoke to get a drink and stepped on one of you in the dark. Your clear shell cracked beneath my weight–and I felt sad. In fact, I didn’t throw you away. Instead, you’ve been moved from the desk to the nightstand, closer to me, your injury acting as a visible testament to the hard life you’ve known as a member of my tribe.

As the years pass, the winds of change blow through across the world, touching even our relationship. I’ve learned to trust the convenience of technology–often typing things like this letter, and my stories. Shifting to digital medium has saved me storage space–instead of toting around hundreds of notebooks, I carry a single laptop these days with all my words safely saved to the Web. I don’t worry about losing pages, but have a newfound appreciation that you never crashed, deleting hours of work. And the joy you’ve given me for so long makes me unable to give you up completely. These days, you help me craft outlines, you scribble out in your faithful ink the very first ideas of every book. With your help, I write the character summaries and late night, eleventh hour additions when I’m too tired to pull out the laptop. And, every month, you help me craft the letters to my daughters that I’ve written them since before they were born. You help record our adventures for them to reflect upon years from now.

Thank you for allowing me to so easily share the thoughts closest to me and, in so doing, allowing me to express the joy creating stories and a written legacy gives me. You remain an inanimate object that I look forward to seeing every day and a true source of delight in my life.

Joyfully,