sol.ace_r

There is always one thing sitting in the same spot every time I open my desk drawer.
No one ever calls its name, and it doesn’t shine like something new,
yet it waits faithfully where it has always been—
an eraser whose corner has worn down into a slanted edge.

It was made to erase things,
but it never truly erases completely.
No matter how hard you press,
dark letters leave faint traces in the grain of the paper.
Something about that feels so much like life,
and it makes me stop and linger for a moment.

There are countless moments we wish we could erase.
A word thrown too hastily,
a feeling too honest for even ourselves,
emotions we couldn’t handle.
In those moments we reach for an eraser, hoping to make it
“as if it never happened,”
but the heart has no such function.
Only time can smooth things out.
Past events become blunt at the edges,
painful moments grow softer,
and someday we can’t even remember
why they hurt so much.

Once, while rereading something I wrote long ago,
I realized I had pressed my sentences too hard—
as if I had poured my heart onto the page with no restraint.
Clumsy and rough in hindsight,
yet I didn’t want to erase them.
Erasing them felt like erasing the “me” of that time as well.

Living, in the end, seems like a cycle
of writing, erasing,
and writing again.
When we erase the wrong parts,
there’s space beside them for another sentence.
On days the heart collapses, it’s the same.
Once today’s regret is rubbed away,
there is room for tomorrow’s small courage to settle in.

The act of using an eraser is strangely poetic.
When we erase, the hand moves backward;
when we write again, it moves forward.
As if we step back for a moment
only to take another step ahead.
Maybe what we call “growth” isn’t anything grand—
just something that hides within these tiny movements.

An eraser grows smaller over time.
Sometimes it becomes so tiny
you can barely hold it between your fingers,
and eventually, one day, it simply disappears.
But that doesn’t mean the stories we wrote vanish with it.
If anything, every trace we’ve written and erased until the eraser wears away
deepens the texture of our life.

Whenever I look at an eraser, I’m reminded of this:
it isn’t what I’ve erased that makes me who I am—
it’s what remains even after erasing.
It’s okay to leave marks,
okay to be awkward,
okay that the past me was clumsy.

So I look at the eraser on my desk
and make a quiet promise to myself:
It’s fine to be wrong once in a while.
It’s fine to be a little messy.
What is erased becomes an empty space,
and whatever is empty can be written again.

And above all, the simple fact
that I am still “someone who is writing”
gives me more strength than I ever expected.