The boy’s hand hovers over the pencil box. He pulls one out, and returns to his seat at sketching class. Although I have been waiting my whole life of five weeks to be used, I am glad that he did not pick me. If the choice is between sitting for another ten seconds unused in a pencil box, or being held by a chubby boy who chews erasers… Well, it’s a no-brainer. Now a red haired girl is selecting a pencil for her sketch. Pick me! Pick me! Pick me! I think desperately. But she grabs a different one. As I sigh in disappointment, the girl glares at the other pencil’s dull, unsharpened tip. She shoves it back in the box… and reaches for me. Me! At last, I’ll be used to create a beautiful sketch, like I’ve always wished. The red haired girl carries me over to her chair, and I try to see the teacher’s example drawing, so I can know what the students are drawing today. But before I can get a good look at it, the girl sits down and lightly sets my tip down on the paper. Will she use me to draw a tree? A person? A dragon? I can only guess as I am swept up the paper, down the paper, to the side. I feel a peculiar sensation, like a kind of tickling, and as the girl moves me around, part of my lead sticks to the whiteness to create curve shapes. Now the sensation changes. It is no longer a tickling. Instead, I feel scraping, and pressure. I was used to particles of lead coming off of me, but now it is coming off painfully in large shreds. I do my best to ignore it, I try to focus on what the end result will be, and how my lead’s new form will likely be taped to the girl’s wall for everyone to see. At last, the pressure stops. My lead is only a pathetic stub now, hardly useful for anything but shading. The girl stands up and walks across the room. Is she replacing me with a sharper pencil, a more worthy pencil? As much as I loved the girl when she originally picked me, now I couldn’t be more angry with her. It’s as if she expected me to stay nice and sharp, even with her shredding all my lead off. Why doesn’t she have realistic expectations? But she doesn’t put me back in the pencil box. She walks right past it to a shelf with some sort of machine on it. It is large, and has a circle-shaped hole in the middle. She sticks me lead-side forward into the hole. Instant agony. I thought the scraping was bad, but this was like the machine wished to completely tear out my lead from my wood mercilessly. Is this my punishment for not staying sharp the way the girl wanted me to? What is the meaning of this? Why is the world suddenly so harsh? All I wanted was to create something beautiful. By the time the girl pulls me out of the machine and goes back to her chair, I am aching all over. Somehow, my lead is now sharp again. I can’t even look at the paper below me, getting closer and closer… When the scraping comes, it doesn’t hurt anymore. What I’ve just experienced is far worse, and now the normal pain feels almost comforting. It only lasts for a few seconds, and when the girl stands up again, I can finally see the finished product. A tall horse, walking on a path with a rider on its back. The rider is holding the horse’s reins, and the horse does not appear to be enjoying being controlled like this. And though the drawing doesn’t show it, I can imagine that the horse would get very tired being forced to be the rider’s transportation all the time. But it obeys anyway, for the rider’s benefit. Suddenly, I can understand why the girl has put me through all this today. It was all for the purpose of creating this horse. When I was in the pencil box earlier, I just wanted to draw. But now I realize that to get pleasurable results, there has to be some pain in the process. At first I thought the girl was punishing me for not staying nice and sharp, but now I see that I was given to the strange machine to restore my sharpness. If she had spared me the pain, I would have gotten duller and duller, until she would look at me and toss me in the trash. I didn’t know at first why the girl did those things to me, but she knew. And when I am used to draw pictures in the future, I will know, too. And it will be worth it.
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