When the Pen Ran Out of Ink

It began with a pen.

Nothing fancy, just a cheap black one she picked up at an airport kiosk because it glided smoothly across a crumpled receipt. She meant to buy it for herself, but at the counter, she thought of him instead — her husband, her best friend, the man who used to leave her small notes on the fridge when love still spoke in sentences, not sighs.

She gave it to him one evening in March. It was an ordinary evening, the kind where you mistake routine for comfort and comfort for safety. Two weeks later, the world shut down. Lockdown began, and love stories all over the world started to feel smaller. Like they were being lived inside glass jars with the lids screwed too tight.

At first, there were candlelit dinners and playlists that felt like time travel. They danced barefoot in the kitchen, laughed over burnt pasta, and told themselves they were lucky, together, healthy, whole. But then, as the days blurred into each other, the silence began to stretch. It grew teeth. It started to bite.

How We Measure Love

When we look back, love rarely ends with fireworks. It doesn’t die in one moment, it erodes quietly.
It lingers in chipped mugs, in half-folded laundry, in the toothbrush still sitting in the holder. It hides in a pen, the one that once wrote grocery lists, apologies, and birthday notes, now forgotten in a drawer.

Maybe that’s what gifts really are, not just gestures of love, but timestamps of who we were when we gave them.
A scarf that whispered warmth.
A book that meant I thought of you.
A pen that said I still want you to hear my voice on paper.

And when love fades, those objects stay behind, holding meanings we no longer do. So we wonder: do we keep them out of nostalgia, guilt, or the faint hope that they’ll mean something again, someday?

The Loneliness of Symbols

There’s something heartbreakingly human about assigning emotions to things. We do it instinctively, as if our hearts need physical anchors to understand loss.

One day, the mug left in the sink stops being just a mug. It becomes the silence after an argument.
The scarf stops keeping you warm. It becomes the memory of laughter on cold evenings.

And the hardest part isn’t losing the person. It’s losing who you were with them, the version of yourself that believed, that reached, that loved without counting.

Because when the symbols fade, you’re left with yourself. And sometimes, that feels like the loneliest thing in the world.

When the Ink Finally Dried

Months after he left, the pen still worked. It scribbled grocery lists, reminders, and the occasional journal entry that always began with “I’m fine.”

But one morning, mid-sentence, the ink ran out.
She stared at the blank page for a long time, then almost laughed. It felt too poetic, too final, as if the universe had written the ending for her. Quiet, clean, unceremonious.

She couldn’t throw it away. Not yet. Because endings aren’t neat, are they? They don’t demand closure; they demand honesty. They ask to be felt — in full, in silence, in the space where love used to live.

And so now, she wonders, maybe we all do,
what’s left of love once the ink finally runs out?

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