My Hidden Treasures

by Songül Arslan

I can't remember exactly when I had my first real encounter with stationery, but it didn't take long for me to become its love fool, its slave for eternity. I guess it all started when I was about eight or nine and my uncle would take home rejects from the paper factory where he worked. Piles and piles of paper, from very small notebooks to giant square pads, were brought to the family with small flaws only Superman would notice. To me the pristine white was mesmerizing and as precious as a diamond.

In the beginning I hardly dared to use the paper, even though I had so much of it that I could easily have finished the coming years of school and university with it and still have plenty left. Yet I found it almost a waste to use it. Ultimately, though, my head cleared a bit and I thought, Why not draw and write on it? The paper, every single piece a reject, was of an excellent and exquisite quality to write and draw on, and doing so turned into my way of paying homage to it. Once I crossed the line of to use or not to use, I made my own magazines and drew figures and made my own ads. This step brought about my love for pens, pencils, fill pens, crayons, biros, everything that could be used as a pen and anything that had to do with writing (like pencil sharpeners, carrying cases and erasers). It was also in that time I started a diary.

The more I used the paper, the more excited I got and the more precious I found it. I could not get enough of it and my usual indifference toward my uncle and his family became a regular request--no, a begging demand--to visit them, not for the family's sake but for my own. My parents would tell me each time not to ask any more paper of my uncle, but it would have been easier to paint a face on the sun. Surely they were embarrassed each time we visited my uncle and I would beg for more paper.

No matter how much I had and how much I already had used, I really could not get enough of paper and pens and all the brothers and sisters of the stationery family. I had begun to develop antennae for new "providers" as well: stationery shops and school supply stores. I carefully examined every little item they had in those shops. The erasers and pencil sharpeners came in every form imaginable: hearts, strawberries, pistols, ice cream cones, smiley faces, moons, golf balls, animals, and on and on and on. I would never leave without making at least one purchase. And there were lots of purchases to be made. The older I got, the more diverse the supply seemed. Notebooks in all forms and shapes--spiral notebooks, plain notebooks, lined notebooks, coloured paper notebooks and notebooks with prints--inspired my flights of fancy.

And then there were Bobby and Kate. I am not sure about the rest of the world but if you were about ten years old at the beginning of the eighties in The Netherlands, Bobby and Kate were it! They were imprinted on every kind of stationery imaginable, most often in a lovely purple color. Each design, whether a pen, pencil, ruler, pencil sharpener or a big, plastic, transparent case with coloured pencils, was a small gem. It became a hype and not only for the already stationery-obsessed. A whole exchange programme started and I traded all my marbles for an item I desperately wanted.

Then I started growing up and lots of things changed around and within me...except for my love of paper products. It seemed just a crush when I was a small child, but the feelings had deepened and become a part of my life. In my high school it was not at all geeky to own stationery and browse through every stationery shop, but university was a different thing. A bit of stationery was one thing but all this paraphernalia with all the imprints--Bobby and Kate had lots of imitators in all kinds of figures--was another. It might have been different if only my love had been more restrained.

Whenever I invited friends over, especially male friends, I learned to hide about three-quarters of my stationery. Their puzzled eyes travelling over the abundance after they realized I was not going to open up my own stationery shop was embarrassing for me. Maybe it was a little bit in my imagination but I thought it best to hide it.

But what happens when you start dating? How to tell him about this first love? It's like saying, you, me and a bunch of stationery and we all know three is a crowd. Or me, myself and stationery. I decided not to tell my boyfriend, but I gradually showed him what I was all about. Each time he visited more pens would appear on my desk and then the notebooks hidden in boxes would find their way out and pencils and their sharpeners would creep out of some mysterious clouds. I knew it was true love when my boyfriend offered me two pencil sharpeners in the shape of writing desks to accompany the rest, all without ever making comments!

The fun part is, all along I thought I was alone in my crazy love but I've recently discovered that there are others like me. I read an account on the internet once about a woman who hid her love from her husband and would take a day off from work without telling him so she could browse through stationery stores. Read here what a few women of Mosaic Minds have to say about it:

Abigail: "I'm in love with Office Depot."

Kisha: "My new boss took me to the supply room last week and told me not to be shy about taking what I wanted. I wanted to weep with joy."

Beverly: "I have reams and reams of paper that I'll probably never use, but I love just having it--I buy more very chance I get."

Twenty years later, at age 29, I am more in love than ever. At the smallest event I find a new opportunity to enlarge my inventory. My newest crazes are gel pens with glitter shine in all kinds of colours and thick, lined notebooks in pastel colours. Fortunately, I don't have to hide them anymore and they are right here beside me, where they belong.