School Supplies

The narrator spots back-to-school displays appearing in stores and feels that familiar bittersweet pull—the end of summer's slow, lazy days, but also a quiet craving for structure. After years of thinking school supplies were something she'd outgrown, she realized she still loved them: the promise of freshly sharpened pencils, new notebooks, and the chance to organize her thoughts. So she started taking herself school shopping again, without needing to explain why.

The stationery shop on Main Street

The story follows her visit to her favorite local stationery shop, the kind of place that sells not just pens and envelopes but also craft kits, wrapping paper draped over an old ladder, and cut-paper Halloween decorations. She picks up a small handle basket and begins browsing. The planners catch her eye first—one with pastel illustrations and a tiny metal ruler for drawing your own grids, another with a dozen different colored satin ribbons. She chooses a dark green ribbon for September, which reminds her of the strong feelings she had in middle school about which color folder belonged to which subject: green for science, yellow for English, red for math. She flips through the journal and settles on red for the beginning of May, chuckling at the sometimes silly connections brains make.

A crane-shaped pair of scissors