I want to help you remember. I want you to feel the last piece of graphite from your mechanical pencil snapping under the pressure of your hand as you furiously scribble slanted words across the page. I want you to feel the frustration when your eraser wears a hole clean through to the desk as you vigorously attempt to wipe away your indelible mistakes.

I want to remind you of what it was like to live in a world full of paper – the notes between friends exchanged on tiny scraps torn from the corners of notebooks; the ridiculous way we celebrated birthdays with Hallmark cards, cards that were written by strangers and mass-produced in a factory, barely leaving room for people to add their personal, two-sentence touches.
We enclosed the cards in small paper envelopes and adorned our gifts in shiny paper décor
to show the recipient how extraordinary the gift inside would be, using our gifts as direct symbols of our love.

We foolishly swallowed the wise words written on tiny rectangles stuffed inside of cookies as we carried out Chinese food on a lazy Wednesday night, allowing the monotony of our lives to be stirred by arbitrarily chosen slips of paper. We accepted these words as our fate for the next three hours out of fear that our lives would remain unfulfilled until that fortune was realized.
How quickly we forgot our greatest dreams and aspirations told to us by mechanical prophets.

I want you to picture the way tear-stained paper beneath tear-stained eyes was effortlessly torn apart as the fibers within it began to break down, the paper and your heart in perfect harmony. Imagine the slow movement of a glowing orange flame as it consumed the page ahead of it, the corners of the paper curling upwards in one final display of fortitude before crumbling to gray ash on the ground. The fire was greedy. It took with it every idea that existed on that page as it dissipated into thin air, leaving only charred remains as proof of its reality.

Paper was plastered to the walls and scattered around the hallways of our school to remind us of various events that we needed to take part in or different charities to donate to. We proudly displayed the posters in our rooms of our favorite bands so that anyone who entered could make instant judgments on our musical tastes. The airbrushed faces of the hottest celebrities hung on our closet doors next to an inspirational quote We pasted together old magazines and photos using double-sided tape, taking hours to achieve the perfect amount of deliberate chaos that goes into the creation of a collage.

Lists consumed our lives, cluttering our desks and filling our waste baskets. If we didn't write it down, it didn't exist to us. We made lists tracking bills, lists of needed groceries, lists of things to do today, lists of names and places and things that we couldn't possibly keep track of. We stuck tiny colored squares to every surface imaginable, used them to mark our belongings in a shared fridge or to remind ourselves of an appointment we had scheduled for that day. We added to our lists the chores we had already done, just for them to be crossed off a moment later. It filled us with a false sense of achievement as we watched the black ink of our pen bleed a horizontal path through the accomplished task, but we didn't give the lists more than a fleeting glance to see what our lives had summed up to be.

I will be the first to admit that we were far from perfect, and waste was one of the biggest problems we faced, but efforts were made in order to reduce it. Paper napkins doubled as a canvas for a blossoming book series when not being used to wipe our faces clean after a meal of barbecue ribs. Phone numbers were written on the backs of receipts to be returned to unsuspecting waiters, business cards held gum that had long since lost its flavor, and half-filled notebooks were opened once again. We took our used paper, recycled it, and then processed it to repeat the cycle. New methods were discovered and new materials were being used. But it wasn't enough.

They started replacing our books with electronic machines that they claimed would feel just like the real thing. The pages appear to be lifted and flipped from the corner as you drag your finger from one side to the other, and the letters on the page are written to mimic the black and white contrast that lies beneath the covers of our favorite novels. But it was all wrong. The smooth, cool plastic felt foreign in my hand. The wind would blow and with it would follow an absence of fluttering pages; its silence rang noiselessly in my ears, louder than any bell or siren.

Our efforts became futile as our landfills began to overflow and our forests began to thin, and paper had become the problem to which there was no solution. And now here we are, stuck in a paperless society in which creativity flows over buttons and keys as words are silently and effortlessly typed and deleted, notes between friends have been replaced by photos of faces sent back and forth on phones, birthdays are acknowledged through a midday text message, lists are stored on electronic sticky notes that can't pop out from the screen to be placed in a more convenient location, fortune cookies only exist in legends, tears of ex-lovers are cried over hand-typed letters which can be satisfactorily destroyed by the image of a garbage can in the bottom corner of the screen. Our rooms appear naked as their walls are stripped of all character, and all that we are left with is memories.

I am begging you to remember the way it used to be, because we've entered into unchartered territory, and the truth is, I'm terrified. I'm terrified that, without posters and love notes and fortunes and cards, without paper and pen, there is no writer left inside of me.