There is a pen in my shirt pocket right now. Same brand, same weight, same blue ink I’ve been buying for years. I own other pens — a drawer full of them, honestly, accumulated from conferences and church offices and those multipacks you grab when you can’t find a single one anywhere. But I always come back to this one.
It’s nothing fancy. It didn’t cost much. It has no story attached to it, no gift tag from someone meaningful. It’s just the pen that feels right in my hand.
I’ve been thinking about small loyalties like this — the ones we don’t examine, the ones that just quietly persist beneath our days. The mug we reach for every morning without thinking. The chair we sit in when we want to actually read something. The route we take to the grocery store even when another one would be faster.
We don’t choose these things consciously. They choose us, or something in us chooses them in some moment of comfort we’ve long since forgotten. And then we keep choosing them, morning after morning, until the choosing stops feeling like a choice at all.
I find something reassuring in that. In a life where I’m often asking large, exhausting questions — about calling, about direction, about what I’m supposed to be doing — the pen that fits right reminds me that some of the truest things about a person are just there, quiet and unpretentious, not waiting to be explained.
My wife has noticed the pen thing, of course. She’s noticed all my small, harmless rigidities, and she has made her peace with most of them. She asked me once why I didn’t just buy a dozen of the same pen and be done with it.
I told her I didn’t want a dozen. I just wanted the one in my pocket.
She looked at me the way she does sometimes — a small, half-amused look that says this is who I married — and went back to what she was doing.
Which is its own kind of loyalty, now that I think about it. Probably worth more than any pen.