Pencil Solly Taragin ‘23

Pencil

Solly Taragin

In my eyes, life is like a pencil and the world is the paper and death is the eraser. It all depends on the strength that you write with. Yes, a better pencil can help and be an advantage over a lousy pencil, but even a lousy pencil can function well and write clearly if you push hard enough. When you die and the pencil turns around to the eraser side, it erases you off of the page. But how strong of an impact did you have? If your pencil pushed really hard, even a good eraser is never going to completely erase its mark. That imprint will always be there. It will never be the same page. It will never be like the pencil was never there at all. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to leave an imprint on the world (or should I say the paper). I’ve always wanted to be a good, strong pencil. Most people are almost completely erased from the page after they die, except for maybe some family related pencils who miss their pencil relative. I want to be missed beyond my family of pencils. I want other pencils to have to write somewhere else on the page because where I wrote still has too much of a mark to write over. I want to write something on the page that’s hard to erase because of how really cool it is. Nobody should want it to be fully erased. I just want to leave a legacy. I want to never be erased because then, in a sense, it’s almost like I would be immortal. It would almost be like I had never died at all.

Did I take the metaphor too far?