blue ink

This week, Amazon sent me two bottles of blue-black shin-kai fountain pen ink when I ordered one bottle of black.

The cardboard mailing box had seemed heavy when I held it. I’d sensed immediately that something was off. And at first, after I opened it, I stared at the bubble-wrapped set of two bottles of Japanese ink in silver packaging thinking I’d been a fool and ordered the wrong thing.

Then I figured if I’d ordered the wrong thing, I might as well suck it up and use it. Because I couldn’t exchange the ink if I’d made a mistake. (I suppose I could, but to analyze why I’m not that kind of girl would take another blog post.)

And then I figured maybe I was meant to use blue ink. Like, the Universe delivered me a boatload of blue-black ink because I was meant to try something new.

Shocking.

So, I filled my fountain pen with blue-black ink—diluting whatever remnants of black were in there—and wrote.

Seeing the blue ink in my journal felt as foreign to me as using yellow ink on cream paper. Jarring. Very much not me.

Just now, I’ve thought about how many years I’ve ordered black ink for my fountain pen. And since I got the pen twenty years ago and am almost sure I’ve only filled it with black—and have used it every day until this year when I finally bought a new one marketed toward men (because pens have gender #sarcasm) (that’s a different story)—that’s more than two decades of using only black ink.

Why? The conscious answer is I tend to think refusal is elegance. (Who said that? I’m too lazy to Google.) That selecting what I like and sticking with it is a way of having distinct personal style.

(This also means I get teased by my husband and friends for wearing black all the time. I recently bought a few plaid and herringbone clothes and my husband told me wryly today that I’ve gone from wearing “dark” clothes to “dark academia.” Hardee har har.)

At any rate, using new to me ink feels a bit like I’m being utterly wild. Throwing around rainbows and wearing a pink feathered boa and goldenrod-framed reading glasses instead of black RayBans.

Note: I’m still talking about using blue ink to write in a journal.

Blue.

I’m restraining laughing at myself, but barely. It’s amusing how the tiniest change can take me out of my comfort zone.

When I see the blue ink, it has… associations.

My grandma used to write me letters with blue ink on these small pieces of filmy lined paper from a notebook that assuredly was purchased from a drug store. They were maybe half the size of a notebook page. (My other grandma used pink paper and a typewriter that had a cursive font. She smelled back then like Oil of Olay and powder. I haven’t seen her since COVID hit, but I imagine she still does.)

But my blue-ink grandma is where I come by my anxiety. She worried about everything, and it came out in her letters. Where she’d cross out words when she changed her mind. It was apparent that she didn’t cross them out upon rereading the letter but as she wrote, perhaps arguing with herself about the choicest word to use. And the changes didn’t make the letters more poetic or grammatically correct. It was more of an OCD thing—like she’d change “usually” to “often.” Something like that. Something that didn’t change the meaning at all, but apparently she needed to alter the letter to soothe her mind.

The substance of her letters were usually (often?) about nothing, though. I would receive a report on the weather from wherever she was. Dusty places like Odessa, Texas, or some horrid little town in California’s Central Valley, full of poverty and despair. She’d tell me about trees that bloomed or grass that needed cutting. I have it in my head that I always got a squirrel report, but maybe that was from my grandpa—what squirrel popped up around what tree and did whatever amusing thing for an hour. I can see her sitting by the window with gnarled knuckles watching that gray squirrel flicking its extravagant tail.

She’s also comment on whatever I’d written. And until this moment, I hadn’t realized that whatever my childish or teenaged hand wrote was probably as dull as the Texas weather and bushy-tailed squirrel report. I likely told her what classes I was taking or where we’d been on vacation. But no matter what, she’s comment.

Maybe the point was, though, that we wrote to each other. And that was enough.

I visited her once and was surprised to see among her meager possessions every single school picture I’d ever taken.

It made me sad.

I don’t think she ever used black ink. 

And now I’m apparently using blue. I just don’t know what I’m going to do when these bottles run out. The world feels a little bit more open—full of vast choice—and that can be a scary thing.