a letter
to the notebook I’ve used for the last six months
I think you had just the right amount of pages. And I am deeply grateful that I never ripped any of them out. I cannot build a history of my heart without all the pieces there. It doesn’t make sense really. The way I write sprouted out of no where. It found me by chance. Grew between my shoulder blades. Bumped elbows with me in theatre classes. Hid in ink stains on my knuckles. Sometimes I fear that I write like I view myself as immaculate. I have never known how to truly save myself from climbing that mountain. I wish I didn’t see my words as so impermanent. I also wish I could write music behind every single one of my poems. So that anyone who hears me might get me stuck in there head. There’s something incredibly cyclical about everything I have ever written. Maybe that’s a sign I need to find more time to read. Maybe it’s more a sign that I am a single perspective. That I need to wear more red skirts. This journal was a gift from a girl I dated long distance. And I never liked the way she said her vowels. Or the way she never listened to my stories all the way through. I was drinking water out of the bottom of my glass. And her hands were never mine. I think I only remember her face when she kissed me against her dorm room door and the doorknob was too cold on my spine. The first poem in this notebook is the last love poem I ever wrote to the upperclassman girl who could not stop finding my eyes but didn’t know that she had to see more of me than that to love me. I could not be her sanity. The poem turned into a heartbroken one. I would like to serve it something warm. For the rest of the poems in my little notebook are about a sunshine boy who is better than novels or time. His poems are like promises. My wrists do not remember how to point fingers. I would like to promise that I will never get a tattoo of my own words. But I will always treat a journal like a marble tablet engraved with laws. I want to set off the alarms. Take a shortcut just so that I can lay on the grass and sing. My poems are self-centered and I love them in bright colors. I think I taught myself to love math. I recognize truths with startling accuracy. I was lying when I said I knew love was someone giving me a notebook. I didn’t know. Love is the gracious act of giving me no new pain to write about. Handing me the silence necessary to converse with what exists already. And believing that we all have the potential to write the poem that changes the world. I am changing my world. Sing to me in perfect harmony. I recognize my heart when I see it. And thank god for that. And thank god some spiral notebooks are actually well made. And thank god I am proof of love’s power. Don’t close your ears. We are worth something. Look for it. That’s where I am trying to go.
