You Are Where You Shop

I spent the mornings of my Winterlude with my fountain pen, nibbling blueberries and scribbling in my notebook.

Can I just say how much I love my fountain pens? I have the black and the purple Twisbi Ecos, both inked with their respective colors. Depending on the day and my mood, I like to toggle back and forth between them.

Among the many attractive retail stores on the Ithaca Commons is a stationary store called Mockingbird Paperie. It’s filled with thoughtfully curated cards, stationary, pens, and ink—everything my aspirational self needs to become the person who writes charming notes to her friends regularly. 

I am not this person——yet. But every time I go into Mockingbird, I become her. There she is, buying just the right card, smelling and touching the large sheets of designer paper cascading over the wooden dowels.

This day, though, she only has eyes for the pens. 

And those serious hexagonal bottles of ink with  unpronounceable Japanese names: 

Iroshizuku-Fuyu-syogun.

Someone once told me if you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, you should just think back to what you loved doing when you were nine. Then, invent a  grown-up version of that, and do it.

I go back to age seven. 

I am sitting at the dining room table, chewing on a black Esterbrook fountain pen between sessions of practicing my cursive capital As and capital Ls.

For homework. 

For the Sisters. 

For the gold star.

And then Carmen, the manager of Mockingbird Paperie, sidles up to me at the ink wall and asks if I’ve ever tried scented ink.

“It’s very subtle,” she says. “You can smell it most when the ink is still wet and hasn’t fully absorbed into the paper.” She loves the lavender.

But where will I put it? I can’t very well empty the black and the purple pen, can I? No, I need those pens to be always inked and ready. 

So, I decide to buy another Twisbi Eco and designate it as my Wild Card pen. 

I get a clear one, I also buy the scented lavender ink and take it back to my Winterlude lair.

My childhood fountain pen ink never smelled like lavender, but this lavender-scented ink brought me back to my little girl self. The one who loved penmanship and writing. The one who played school, standing at a blackboard wielding a long pointer with a little rubber tip that bounced from word to word.

The one who wrote rhyming poems for her mother for Christmas well into her teens. The one who could spend a whole weekend, belly down on the bed, reading.

Stationery stores, bookstores, libraries. 

Notebooks, binders, and three-by-five cards.

Desk accessories, blotters, bookmarks, and pencil cases. 

These are my things. This is what I love.

I visited Mockingbird every day of my Winterlude. I bought another bottle of scented ink, this time in rose. It looked like blood as it sucked up into the barrel of my pen.   But this blood smelled like roses.

Turns out I like it better than the lavender.

The next day, I bought a bottle of ink called Sunset. It writes in orange. Its day will come, but it isn’t now. 

We have so many selves inside who we are now. Who we are now is one of those Russian Matryoshka dolls with smaller versions of ourselves nested comfortably inside.

When we go into a store: a candy store, a hardware store, an art supply store, a music store, a bookstore, and we feel that deep connection to the stuff for sale there, we know we are with our things; that one of our selves knows about this place, uses this stuff, and shops here regularly.  

We feel the need to linger, so we say to our friend, “Why don’t you go ahead. I’ll meet you in a little bit. I’m going to stay and look around.”

That’s that old self wanting you to remember her, feed her, pay attention to her. You didn’t follow this path, your life took another direction, but as you walk the aisles of this store, you wonder if you still could be that other one. 

What if you started paying attention to her? What if you bought her a bonbon, or a book, or a ukulele, or a pen, or a set of wrenches?

What if that old self sat down with a pen filled with rose-scented ink and wrote a notecard to a dear friend? A friend you miss talking with, and eating Thai food with, and getting such wise advice from? 

What if the stores with the things you love the most are like little doll houses where you once lived? And you can still visit them and play in them when you go to that store? 

There, you can pretend you still are that self you left behind: that writer, that musician, that painter. 

You might buy yourself a little reminder to take home and use. And who knows? Maybe that thing becomes a sacred totem for you, an amulet with the power to alter the course of your life.

Who knows?