THE BOLIGRAFOS

It never occurred to young Boligrafos to conserve their ink. Having known nothing but completely full ink cartridges, the youth would spend hours upon hours composing sonnets, odes, essays, novels, screenplays and more, scrawling words with reckless abandon, knowing they had sufficient ink inside to cross out a mediocre noun or nondescript adjective in future edits. Even lazier ones who only ever bothered to attempt Monday crossword puzzles would still blot haphazard guesses into the corners rather than holding them under their caps until they were certain. Eh, I’ll just write over it if it’s wrong, they thought. 

Young Boligrafos often wondered why older Boligrafos were so stingy with their words. Why, when they hit midlife, did all Boligrafos seem to suddenly favor haikus over epics, and why did older Boligrafos sometimes go years without writing anything down at all? There were assumptions, of course – older Boligrafos weren’t as creative as younger Boligrafos, or perhaps they just forgot words at some point. The youthful scribblers couldn’t imagine what exactly caused the change, they only knew that they, of course, would never stop writing, ever. They would never become them.

Older Boligrafos knew of these assumptions, of course. They had believed them themselves back in their youth, when their ink chambers were full, the liquid so completely filling its container they were barely even aware of its presence. Possessing infinite ink was an undeniable constant, a truth they didn’t even realize they were taking for granted. And although they did occasionally miss the heady, careless days of their youth when they would dribble and splash their ink across whatever surface they came across, all of them had eventually come to the same realization at some point – that their ink was limited, and therefore precious. 

The realization almost always came, not a little at a time, but with a sudden, unexpected shock. They’d be doodling idly in the margins of a book and an air bubble would burst out their nib, strangling their solid, juicy line into a shriveled squeak. They’d retrace the line two or three times in a panic and the ink inside would start to flow again, but once it happened they couldn’t deny the truth – they were running low. And then they could finally name the feeling that had been growing inside them, which they had never felt before and therefore couldn’t comprehend. The feeling of their ink sloshing around in their internal chamber, as more of it spilled out and was replaced with air. The feeling of emptiness. 

And once they accepted the truth, all Boligrafos began to treat their words as the finite resources they were. Gone were the days of idle conversations and collaborative story-telling with their friends. The Boligrafos would now strive to conserve as much as possible, to delay the inevitable as long as they could. This meant that no older Boligrafo ever bothered to try to fully explain to a younger Boligrafo the importance of ink conservation. Anyway, they knew from experience that it was impossible for the youth to fully appreciate the day when their inkwells would start to run dry and their Day of the Last Word would appear on the horizon. 

The Day of the Last Word was something that all Boligrafos understood was an unavoidable conclusion, but to young Boligrafos it was more of an urban legend than an inevitable reality – something that only happened to really, really, really old Boligrafos, which was something that they themselves would never become. Besides, the Day of the Last Word could be delayed indefinitely if an older Boligrafo was content to never write anything again. The oldest Boligrafo in the world was over 150 years old and would have been able to share an invaluable trove of wisdom and first-person history, but since he hadn’t wasted a drop of ink in a century, no one had bothered about him for generations and he lived a solitary, dusty life behind a broken refrigerator.

Most Boligrafos did go completely silent at the end, usually for a few weeks, occasionally for a year or two, while they tried to extend their existence as long as possible. And then when they realized how boring infinite existence truly is, they focused instead on making their Day of the Last Word as perfect as possible.

For some Boligrafos, that meant finally revealing long-held secrets with cryptic phrases such as “in the basement” or “not your father.” For others, this meant spending their last moments surrounded by their loved ones before penning, “I love you,” or if they were poor planners, “I love yo.” And still there was a third group, which was only fractionally smaller than the first two, which focused on tracking down life-long enemies and scratching out a certain four-letter word followed by a certain three-letter word, thus having the final, conclusive say to their feud.  

However an old Boligrafo chose to end their formally verbose life, what happened afterwards was always up to the friends and family of the deceased, as of course no Boligrafo ever bothered to waste ink describing their post-mortem wishes. If the Boligrafo was famous enough, their body would be kept on display at the National Hall of Stationery next to their last word(s), redacted as necessary. Or if they were both philanthropic and of no particular religious denomination, their parts could be removed and donated to those unfortunate souls who had been born with defective springs or had perhaps lost their caps in childhood accidents. And of course some Boligrafos refilled their loved one’s internal chambers with an artificial ink, buried them in the ground, and comforted themselves at night with the thought that the deceased was now decomposing slowly over the course of several hundred or thousand years. 

Only once, in the entire history of the race of Boligrafos, had anyone lived their life in a contrary manner. A simple yet wise Boligrafo realized at a very young age that the less he wrote, the more he read, and the more he read, the more he learned. He spent year after year reading and learning, reading and learning. He learned about youthful exuberance and elderly wisdom. He learned about generosity and conservation. He learned about conflict and judgments, and also empathy and grace. And when finally, after a lifetime of reading and learning he was ready to share his words with the world, words that could finally bring peace and joy to all Boligrafos, he brought his ink to the paper and got only 33 words in before he was executed for the crime of Thinking He Was Better Than Everyone Else.