Opening Day of Halloween Sock Season

I wear them year round, but I get to make up songs about them in October.
...I'm not...crazy.
Oh no! Two posts in two days! I've tried not to do that...I'd like to make people think I have a life. And I should be studying. But. Whatever.

We were going over King Lear in Shakespeare today. My mind tends to wander when I relearn things I’ve already done, so I was looking for my syllabus to see what other assignments we had to do for the class. It’s too wonderful to just be a purely educational experience, I was telling myself. Everything in my educational experience tells me that you can never just actively absorb knowledge: you have to do silly assignments to prove that you’re paying attention. This tends to kill the joy of learning. It’s like BYU’s Honors program (again, for another post…if I ever decide I want to write about the assininity). But Shakespeare isn’t like that. We have assignments, but I like them. I see the purpose behind them. And they don’t interfere with my learning.
I have a purple 5 subject spiral bound notebook that represents the last two years of my major’s classes. I love it. It’s seen me through 291, 293 (crazy death class), and 314. Now it’s with me in 292 and 382 (Shakespeare). We have a lot of history, this notebook and I. It’s crammed full of frantically scribbled pages, the not uncommon “I HATE AMERICAN LIT” vituperations, marginal doodlings generated in last-ditch attempts to stave off sleepiness, and the cover is scuffed and limp, its corners rubbed round. In short, it is a seasoned and mighty warrior. So as I was going through this timeless and scarred notebook of mine, I flipped to a random page and a thrill shot through my body as a loose sheet of notebook paper shifted in the shuffling: it was covered in the blue ink and column-style layout of one of my famous blank verse poems. (“Famous” here is very tongue-in-cheek: my past writings are most prolifically blank verse because prose is boring to look at and formulaic poetry takes too much concentration. So, essentially, I am a lazy writer, looking for a shot of intrigue in my writing without working for it.) It was an old one. I had ripped it out of some other section and stuck it hastily in its current location. The little hanging, ragged paper tags from the spiral binding were bent at disparate angles and well-creased from the months it spent in the notebook. The spiral binding had rubbed the left edge shiny and gray, and the top, bottom, and right edges were frayed from hundreds of trips in and out of my backpack.
There was no title for the poem. I began to read and remembered the first three lines only, recalling a vague image I had that inspired it in my 8 am writing about literature class (that’s 314. Distant second in crazy death class ranking): I used to make a tick mark for each of the 75 minutes in the margins of my notes to give myself a minute-ly task to keep myself awake. So the first three lines came back quickly to me. But the rest of it I don’t remember writing at all. I obviously did, because it’s my handwriting…and I obviously wrote it early in the morning, while half asleep…but I don’t remember it. As I read it, I had the distinct impression that I had meant completely different things when I wrote it as compared to what I got out of it today—especially that last section. After going over it a few times, I have a pretty good idea of what I originally meant, which is not at all what I interpreted the first time I read it today. That was so exciting. My writing preserved a part of myself and I could witness my growth through comparing the thought processes of both of me’s. The poem was completely free of editing, with no places that I marked out, no altered phrasings or replaced words, so I will put it here as I found it, unedited, weird punctuation and all, not for its artistic merit (though, in truth, I am pretty pleased with how some of it comes out), but because it’s such an exciting discovery for me (despite the well-worked-over theme). And this is my blog.

Every second passed
Builds a store behind us
Depletes the mound before us
Lengthens the path at our backs
into the enveloping haze
Misty vagueness
Not taking our remaining steps away—
Presenting new twists, turns, forks,
No turning back.
Every second step brings us closer to something
Past another, away from another
Cherish each—be the moment.
It was in soul-sucking that I
first heard—“Life is just waiting
around for the next thing
to happen. Death is all we
can count on.” Protect your soul.
Wear a scarf. Go kick through
the leaves. Roll in the snow.
Embrace these other aspects of Self.
The warm, musky essence of Being.
curled within the nest of blankets and sheets
“Shared experience relieves humans
of the loneliness of individual existence.”
Fall into the arms of a like mind,
wrapped around, curled together,
willingly suspend your disbelief,
just for a moment, and see us 2
connected on, not on a wire,
but a silken thread.
Because you knew these words
before I wrote them.