Foreword: These things survived The Fire!

[or Growth I: The Present, tomorrow, will be Past.]

I wrote a lot when I was little. The things I wrote between the ages of 13 to 17 could fill up a memoir. Whenever obligations threatened to overwhelm me, I pushed them aside to make time for myself (I still do). My parents and teachers could not understand it. It was a gripping force that pushed me to create. To express. In “expressing” that much I realised myself. And I’m grateful for it.

I’m not sure when, but at some point in my years of great productivity, I discovered pain. Raw and unabating. That pain has escorted me till now. After that I developed a habit for self sabotage. That year I burned what I thought was all of my childhood photos, paintings, and writings. I thought I was finally free of the burden; The [familiar] feeling that I could do better than this. Or that I had potential for anything. I could finally embrace my pain and be at peace with it.

Very recently, I went home for the first time in months. I found old poems, ideas, and musings I wrote on pieces of paper (now yellow with age), in empty notebooks, in between novels etc. These ones survived The Fire! So I will type out some of them here, on Medium, a̵s̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵y̵ ̵a̵r̵e̵ . I will schedule them to go up with time. I want them to live forever.

After rereading some of the selected poems, I decide to revise them. Nothing that would alter their original intent or meaning; Just punctuation, typographical errors, and things like that, to make them a little more readable.

Also, I thought to add footnotes (like this). To explain where the poems had come from. Like an origin story. I wanted to write what I thought about them as an adult…but I’ve decided I won’t; I will let anyone who reads form an opinion themselves.