Ink

This is the ink reservoir of a pen.  When I get bored in classes, I take apart my pen and put it back together again, always amazed at the simple yet complex interactions of tiny pieces of plastic to form such a useful tool.  As I did this last week, I looked closely at the tube of dark blue-black ink inside the pen; specifically the stark boundary between the ink and the used-up and empty reservoir of gel.

A pen is an extraordinarily powerful tool.  A pen creates governments and overthrows them.  A pen writes every majestic symphony and every brilliant novel.  A pen makes us laugh and makes us cry. But without ink, a pen is a worthless piece of plastic.  Ink is the blood coursing through the veins of every word every human has ever written.  Ink gives life to dead and empty pages and pens.

But as this image proves, the ink will not remain in the pen forever.  The ink remains immortal on the page, living on for all to read forever, but not so in the pen. The pen is slowly used up, its core gradually transforming from a full and healthy dark blue to a hollow and ghostly white.  The pen bleeds out, having carefully used every last drop of its life to fulfill whatever its purpose may have been, and becomes a plastic skeleton, destined for a landfill where it will sit silent, unused, and dead for millennia, not feeling the joy or the pain caused by the words it has written.

This pen still has ink.