Dear Daddy.

I wrote this for a close friend who I had met on my travels. The story was always close to my heart.

A ghostly beam of moonlight sheds through the window laced with thin curtains, lighting up a stretch of wood with four legs and a collection of pens and papers. Ordinary ink pens and wooden pencils strewn across the desk, sitting over stacks of lined paper. One pen, if you were to look down, seemed to almost glow even bright than the others.

Sweaty fingers grasped this pen, rolling it over and over. Icy blues staring at it intently. After the devastation of such a short lifetime crossed the owner of what lay in front of her, a young girl began to write.

Setting just the tip of the pen to a clean scarp of paper she gasped out in pain, fright, and shock.

It was gone. All of it. Its ink was worn out. She shook it violent, warm tears forming in her perfectly shaped eyes, silently running down her rosy cheeks now turned pale. Her heartbeat started to quicken and she swore she could have thrown it up.

Reality settled in, exploding like a bomb inside of her. Every thought of happiness was cascading from her and disappearing in the dark. How was she supposed to smile now?

Thirteen years ago her hero left her. The man that she would never hurt her or send her in tears such as these now. Her father had past away faster than she could say goodbye, yet she denied it all. She forgot it all, ignored it all. The last thing he had ever given to his dear sweet baby girl was a pen.

”Write me letters while I’m away.” He told her softly and flashed a grin. She didn’t understand it…the fact that he knew what was going to happen. After all was said and done she took his last words and every night before she laid her head down to sleep she’d write him a letter.

She knew that he wasn’t their to help her through her homework, boys, friends, heartbreak, and peer pressure. But she wrote those things to him. She expressed things to him that not even the girls at school who she clung tightly to knew. Tears were often imprinted in these letters.

Yet now, after thirteen years of these writings, the pen was all out of ink. Of course she could still write him letters and tell him all that was going on with her in life…but it wouldn’t mean anything to him or her. He gave this very pen to her and told her specifically to write him and now it was gone.

The pen lacked the ink that settled its way into her heart and made the pain of loss subside for so many hours. The smile she once wore wiped clean off her face as if all those words she scrawled down on all those papers were suddenly blank.

Their was nothing to write with…therefore their was nothing to smile about.

The pen was all out of ink.