It's my reading rainbow.

I always used to watch that show on the KQED station when I was a real little kid. Same channel that aired Sesame Street and Donohue. I remember loving the former and being not so crazy about the latter, although I did think he had a funny name (the Phil part, I had no gripe with the Donohue surname). They also held lengthy pledge drives from time to time, so their normal broadcasting would get booted in favor of the cash gathering telethons. Not understanding this as a four-year-old, I once dumbly waited and watched almost an hour of people answering phones until I realized there wasn't going to be any Sesame Street that day.

Anyways, my laptop burnt out a couple months ago. It doesn't boot up at all anymore, and seems to have some sort of massive hardware problem. I have all but conceded my laptop, a loyal companion for the past two years, is deader than Strom Thurmond (voted America's deadest man in 2007!). I lament the lack of on-the-go tech (I'm writing this on a laptop borrowed from my little bro), but until I can save up for one of them MacBooks, fuck it. No more of this PC shit.

Point is, all my documents are gone-ish. There's a possibility they may have been saved on my roommate's external hard drive, but I don't have a computer to transfer them to. I had written a tremendous amount, and had kept the files safe for a long time. Somewhere lurking in that burnt out husk of a computer is a fantasy-fictiion story I had to write for a middle school assignment but ended up extending to five chapters of my own volition (as I recall it involved a hypercompetitive hockey-esque sport with three player teams and sharp, treacherous spears). All my creative writings and essays I wrote in high school and my one year of semi-academic college. An I-Search report from sixth grade for which I read all three of the Oedipus plays (heavy stuff at age twelve) and put in nedless hours of research, only to get a ninety-five percent because I didn't indent the second lines on my bibliography. I resented Ms. Mesplou deeply for that, but she was also the hottest teacher at my middle school, so being twelve, I couldn't stay angry for that long.

This momentary loss of documents has rattled me, because I'm a very nostalgic person in certain ways. I recently discovered a bag full of my old schoolwork from first grade, and I spent a whole night sifting through it, reading over it as best I could. Terrible handwriting. But when i could make something out, it felt sort of chilling, like reconnecting with something I'd lost a long time ago. It's a disturbing but also seductive feeling, having those gateways into your past. It's one of the reasons I wan to write as much as I can. I want the fifty year old me to know what the twenty year old me was all about, in the event that I can't piece it together for myself.

Here's a poem I wrote about a year and a half ago. It's a romantic sonnet I wrote for somebody. I didn't come clean to her at the time that it was about her, but that's since been rectified. I think it's probably the piece of poetry I'm proudest to have written, maybe because the breadth of emotion that enters a romantic poem makes it seem somehow greater than it is. Worth noting, it does break form, since there's only eight beats per line in the closing couplet. But the words were exactly as I wanted them, so I left it.

It’s sweet and fine to sit beneath a tree
Tangling eyes and hearts beneath the flesh
Where romance is but doesn’t try to be
When every deep breath feels so pure and fresh

Such love could only strike a man by luck
To dive headfirst into a soul so deep
To fight to keep his eyes from getting stuck
As soft lips and hips through his mind do creep

It’s the light of the world you give to me
With windswept features that burn my memory
And selfless courage that sets my worries free
If only you could be my one, my every

Your eyes, your nose, your ears, your hair
Have left my heart beyond repair