Sticky fate

"would you rather that, than be alive and out of bounds of a careless caretaker?"

I keep the stickers from my pens on the wood of my table. Often, I don’t pay attention and throw them away, but I don’t forget to give them a proper send off. I fold them, letting the corners that have never met each other, hold themselves before they reach the end. Sometimes I am too absent minded to remove them from the pen in the first place. Maybe they are glad to be purposeful for a little while longer. On certain days I find myself thinking – as I remove them off the pen, I look at them and realise they might have not fulfilled their potential. Maybe it’s just my guilty conscience. I’m in control of their fate after all.

The stickers seem to be fatalists. They don't do much but their duty and sit helplessly. As I utter these words out loud, they look at me judgmentally.

“What? Am I wrong?”

“You don’t give us any other duties, what are we to do”

I’ve provided them with all they need. I have fulfilled my duties. And yet they sit in silence, stuck to the pens. Stubborn or ignorant, they stand firm with their belief in fate. How will they realise that I don’t care enough to manage their individual lives? Not a single one of them can rely on coincidence or the working of the systems and universe to end up where they want to go. Sure, it’s easier to let your adhesive be. But would you rather that than be alive and out of bounds of a careless caretaker?

Perhaps they realise their potential as their adhesive wears off naturally, as the dust collects in their corners, and the pen they are attached to is down to its last few lines of thought. Much too late, dismissively I stare.  They must lie in wait, holding on to what is familiar as I throw away the pen to a corner. Maybe the pen lost to the classroom eventually finds a way to set its sticker free. A sacrifice. A selfless act in its last moments, I can only keep it together until it goes down.

The pens I don’t enjoy are the ones on which I don’t care for the sticker. They bore me to a point where they, solely, must guarantee the freedom of their sticky counterpart. A pen cannot change my perception, it is stuck to its fate, more rigidly than the sticker is. Am I overlooking the functionality of a sticker? It gives its pen a sense of identity, a value and a name in the least. The stickers don’t have their own name, their own identity. They are a signboard I pay too much heed to.

Pity, I pity the sticker. I pity the pen. Conjoint, yet their fate separates them to different lives. They blame me, they did this before. But what am I to do? A complex game of fate bestowed upon a careless caretaker.

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