Fern's Pen

“When I begin to fall for someone,” she said, “one of the first things I do is I write their first name.”

The brass tip of her calligraphy pen vanished into its companion inkpot, and emerged with a thin coating of liquid night sky. Excess ink was drained off against the glass walls of the reservoir, in slow and deliberate strokes.

The pen touched the paper like a small bird alighting upon a branch of white birch. Immediately upon contact a dot of ink began blossoming on the page, darkening with every millisecond that she held the pen’s nib at that particular spot. I watched, fascinated, as she drew the ink upwards, then down, then in careful but free-flowing flourishes.  A few words later, I vaguely recognized the opening lines of a poem or play we had studied once. Possibly last year, when Fern and I had shared a literature course, and when I had first noticed her unique character. She rarely spoke in class, but in the rare moments she did, she always found a way to confound the professor, while simultaneously tying the neurons of my own brain into daisy chains.

What a strange habit, I thought. My daisy-chained mind immediately wondered if she had ever written my name,  whether the mountains and valleys of my letters had ever danced across the cream-colored pages of that little black sketchbook. “How come?” I asked.

“Some girls fantasize about last names. They attach the surname of their desired to their own, and mull over how it sounds. They imagine themselves being addressed as such, and giggle, and other silly things.” Fern brushed aside a strand of strawberry-blonde hair that had fallen across her face, and I noticed her chipping nail polish.

 “I like to see how their first name unwinds on paper. I think about how that name fits their personality…how those vowel and consonant sounds match their traits.” She paused for a second and frowned, perhaps pondering how to best explain this to me… an ignorant, simple-minded boy.

“Gentle,” she wrote a lower-case o.

“Inquisitive…” a long-tailed y appeared on the page

“Assertive…” a tall letter t.

Fern paused for a moment. From the somewhat glazed look in her eyes, I knew that she was thinking about someone. A specific name, made up of specific letters, each carrying a specific definition that she had already determined. She dipped the pen back into the reservoir, and then I watched in slow-motion as the pen began making its gentle arc toward the paper. 

Suddenly, it was no longer a harmless finch...but a sharply taloned bird of prey honing in on my small, frantic mouse heart.

Lately, I've been really into calligraphy.