Editor's Note: I recently finished reading Moby-Dick. Some of the analogies in this post may reflect this.
You don't remember where you first saw it. Someone posted a picture on Instagram. Or wrote a review on their blog. However you first saw it, the important thing is that you saw it. Somewhere. Your white whale. Your Grail Pen. The pen that always seems to be just out of your reach. It's too expensive. It's been discontinued. It's too expensive because it's been discontinued.
You search.
You deliberate.
You almost pull the trigger.
Then one magical day the stars align. The price is right. You have the money. Queequeg-like you launch your harpoon.
If it's at a pen show you consider yourself lucky. Lucky because you don't have to wait for someone to ship it halfway around the country (or worse, halfway around the world) before you can get your hands on it. Congratulations, you may skip to the penultimate paragraph.
If you can't get to a pen show or saunter on down to the local pen shop, you procured it online. So you wait. And wait. You keep refreshing your package tracking app. That makes it get there sooner, right? On the positive side, you have ample time to agonize over what you're going to ink it up with first.
Finally it arrives. You stare at the box, filled with trepidation. What if you've hyped it up so much in your head that it can't possibly be anything other than a disappointment? You open the box. It's like opening the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Daintily, with kid gloves even, you take the pen out. Do you dare mar its pristine beauty by shoving it into an ink bottle? You do. You put the pen to paper and at long last you write with it.
Hello new friend.
