Adding It Up

What a wonderful, magical life I have! I get to appear in thousands of places in millions of ways and I never look exactly the same twice. The variety of helpers that create me seems to be endless; pens, pencils, crayons, markers and even paint brushes, to name just a few. Every moment of every day is a new adventure. Today, I have this feeling of excitement, like something new and wondrous is going to happen. I can't explain why. I just do.

"WhooHoo! This is nice!" I think as I feel my ink flow and glide smoothly across the satiny surface. I've got the place to myself and I enjoy the wide open space. Looks like my human has gotten herself a new one of those package-type things with the pretty covers that she likes to call a "journal." I'm loving this paper, so slick and smooth. Uh-oh, she'd better be careful, though. The ink doesn't dry very quickly on the fancy stuff, we learned that a while ago when she managed to smear me into something that resembled a Rorschach test instead of her pretty penmanship.

Speaking of messes, I should have known that the wide open spaces wouldn't last long. Appearing next to me are some loopy, elaborate strokes. Letters. Lots of them. I happen to be a Number, and Letters and Numbers don't communicate......effectively, shall we say. We typically symbolize different things, so it's not all bad. Now, what's the difference between Letters and Numbers? Good question. I guess we Numbers are used to count and list things, and Letters get to spout off and tell more of a story. But we really can't do without each other, because Letters need the descriptive qualities of Numbers more often than they'd like to admit. So there.

She writes "Lose Weight" next to me and then moves her hand down one line on the lined, satiny paper and then I hear a musical sound. She makes two strokes and putting the pen down, she leaves to respond to it. I think she's called that sound the "phone" before. It's at times like this that I feel some sympathy for Letters. We numbers are pretty cut and dried. Even though we can be drawn and written in different styles, everyone basically understands us. "Ph" being pronounced as "F" and "eight" being pronounced two different ways are confusing. It's just downright wrong, if you ask me.

Hmmm.. Here's a new addition on the line below me. It's the Number that comes after me, Two. Two is fairly odd-looking and not very self-explanatory, but to be honest, most Numbers aren't. In fact, it seems that myself, Number One - is about the only one that really makes any sense at all. Just one stroke of the pen or pencil. Two has some curves thrown in there so being a two-stroke Number is a little "Iffy." The rest of the numbers all have two or three strokes, except for 6 and 8 because of all those curves again.

Time to be gracious and say hello. "Hey, Two, how ya doing? Haven't seen you since we were Twelve a while back!"
"Yeah, that was a lot of fun, One. Good to see you standing on your own again. Especially on this slippery paper. Good thing the phone rang or I'd be pure smudge by now!" Two replies.

"You know, if she keeps going we could get to be Twelve again, " I say. "We could!" Two squeals excitedly. "Maybe even Twenty-One if she has a lot of resolutions this year!"

"Well, I guess that's as far as we'll ever be able to go together, Two," I sigh. Two comes back with "Not true! It might be true on her list here but we can move up to hundreds and thousands and millions and billions!"

Embarrassed, I reply "I knew that, I guess I forgot for a minute. I was just thinking about this list." "It's okay," Two says, laughing. "This paper is so slippery I'm amazed that we haven't ended up together already!" I start to feel all warm and fuzzy. The human is coming back to the desk and I'm filled with anticipation.

And then everything goes dark. We feel the paper moving and get a little dizzy, both of us hollering "what?" and "woah!" a couple of times. We hear a soft bumping sound as she closes the drawer of her nightstand.

Don't you just hate it when that happens?

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Footnotes
1  The actual Writing Prompt was "The Numbers One and Two Meet for the First Time" I started with that but it turned into something else as I was having fun with it!