Contributor: Monica Rose

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Their story was written in pencil.
Scrawled on a mere two pages of his moleskine,
promises of new beginnings dripped from his lead tip.

His words colored their moments,
fleeting memories printed boldly onto soft white sheets;
their time together summed up in incomplete poems and entries.
His sentences flowed free of grammatical errors,
edits and erase marks unnecessary;
their story not needing to be fixed.
His letters intertwined as his lines were written in cursive;
their embrace complex and striking,
beautiful and unordinary.

Their story was written in pencil and somehow, somewhere,
he stopped mid-sentence.

Turning back to bent and ripped pages, he rediscovered his past.
Although broken, the old stories he wrote still remained fresh to him;
flashbacks he held onto that were printed in ink, bleeding with permanence.

A confused author unwilling to continue a new tale,
his moleskine is open on his desk to the pages of ink.
The pages in pencil are no longer touched,
as the reader runs her fingers
along the moments he once wrote of.
Their story was short, with incomplete sentences and unfinished phrases.
Their story is now abandoned and fading;
what they shared and what they had now disappearing
into nothing but faint words, erasable figures.

Their story was written in pencil - temporary.


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Monica Rose is a floral soul left to blossom in the Southern California sun. Her work has been published in her school's paper the Informer, and hopes to spread her pieces to new journals and sites.