The Typewriter

As you can see, I’m a typewriter. As you can see, I’m not as inanimate as you thought I was. As you can see, I do remember a lot of things – the stories that have been written through me, channelized on to paper by my mechanics. You know how they say that a guitar remembers every song, every note that’s ever been played on it? And how they say that a book remembers every emotion, every bit of imagination that flashed through the reader’s mind? Well, we typewriters – not all of them, but just some of the more gifted ones amongst us – have the same ability; especially the ones that have been used to tell their stories to the world. I am lucky to be one such typewriter.

I’ve been handed around a lot, passed on from one hand to the next for the initial few years of my life. During that time, I was nothing more than a clerk’s tool – writing memos, printing an address – that was supposed to be my forte. Nobody wondered if the mechanical piece of equipment wanted to tell stories. Rather, if this particular piece of equipment wanted to learn about the art of telling stories. Things seemed hopeless (in hindsight, of course, because I never knew how fulfilling telling stories could be back then), until I was bought and paid for by her.

She was a romantic; an adventuress. She loved making mistakes, and she loved breaking the rules – not because she was a rebel or an anarchist, but just to test the waters. When people around her had started using a trusty computer, she stuck by faithfully with our kind. She picked me up at a flea market, lovingly cradled me in her arms, and carried me home like I was her first born child. It was love at first touch.

I never knew what she looked like, but I knew her better than anyone else can claim. We stood by each other, faithfully, for many years. I had never seen her face, but I knew her fingertips well. I knew her thoughts, and her dreams, like they were my own. In a way, they were my own. After all, it was only through her that I lived – really lived – my life the way I did.

She loved telling stories, but there weren’t many who were keen to hear them. She wasn’t beautiful in the conventional way (in fact, she used to call herself hideous!) and so never seemed to have many friends around her. She wanted to study. She wanted to write. She wanted to tell her stories. She wanted to build something, even if it was nothing more than an imagined, fantasy world. The world around her, however, wasn’t so keen to let her do that. The world around her wanted her to live a quiet life, have a family, make babies, raise them, and slip away once she was done in the silent arms of death. But she wouldn’t have it that way.

Having never seen her face, I never had the chance to make such judgements. I loved her for the way she told her stories, and the way she spoke them out to me. I revelled in the fact that I used to be the first one to hear those stories, and I nurtured them as if they were all mine. Now, I know I have a few of my own to tell, but they’ll never be as good as hers. But, I digress.

For fifty years or so, we made and broke people. We conjured up worlds together. We gave our characters strange names, people who came from strange places. We built those men, those women, and those children carefully, and breathed life into them. We felt the sting of the arrows, or the blow of a mighty punch. We felt the power of death, wielded by our hands. We made our heroes bleed, and we made our villains cry. We rejoiced in victory, we lamented for the dead. We fell in love, and we had many a lovers’ spat. You see, we built worlds together – intangible though they might be. And when the story was done, we stepped back to look at it for a while, before diving right into the next story.

It was only through her that I created something new, and I loved her for it.

It’s been many years since she passed away, but she lives on in my memories. And the stories she crafted so carefully; they still burn strong inside me, and I do churn one of them out from time to time – there are, after all, so many to choose from. But then, I’ve become old. I’ve become redundant now. I’ve been locked up inside a storage box and left alone for many years. The world has moved on, but I can’t.

I won’t have to. I still have her memories with me. I still have her stories with me. It doesn’t matter what her name was. It doesn’t matter what she looked like. I’ve never seen her face, and I’ve never known her name – but when those fingertips touched me, and when a new story poured forth from her mind into me, and on to the paper that was being hammered, I knew that none of that mattered.

Because I knew then, just how beautiful she really was.

~

Inspired from Magpie Tales.