my ENTIRE life, the football player and playing victim

There is nothing more humbling than reading poetry you wrote at 14. Trust me, I just found a notebook full of it. A notebook covered with angels, since that year also included my failed attempts at adopting my friends' enjoyment of both youth group and Jesus. It's the old "well, everyone else is doing it" teenage story. Except that being the super-focused judgy kid that I was, the drug- and drinking-related peer pressure was prefaced by the Jesus Is Awesome kind by a good five years. Yeah. There's a reason my parents weren't concerned with me not having a curfew.

Though if you believe the predictable rhyme schemes of 15 year-old Amy, there was clear cause for concern. Because for the nearly two years this notebook covers I was madly, totally, completely in love. Like "I will never forget you my ENTIRE life" in love. Writing poems with titles like "Shattered", "Letting Go", "Grieving" and "No More Words" (which may have been a bit premature- it's followed by at least 20 pages of more). I mean, I was in love with this guy people. And not the kind of shit girls write before they give it up to a guy, it's the kind of stuff that fuels the creation of suicide pacts. Maybe not the ones that get followed up on, more the kind that get talked about late at night during the recurring "Nobody understands us" commiseration, but still, intense.

So the weird thing is that I have no idea who these were written about. Or if they were even written about the same guy, or if the guy actually existed anywhere besides my hilarious early attempts at profound depth. Absolutely. No. Idea. I remember my high school crushes: the football player, the guy in Texas, the awkward but entertaining friend, the guy I ended up dating for a minute or so years later. And I hope, for both their sake and mine, that it was none of them. 

But my pride aside, I know it was probably about all of them. Or at least the idea of them, which likely came from my thoughts of myself at the time. I mean, I was a middle class white kid from a stable (if broken) home, who got straight-As and worked at Baskin Robbins... maybe I just needed something about my life to be a little fucked up. Needed something to blame my blossoming teenage (now "twenty-something") angst on. I needed adversity, to be the victim of something beyond my control. So I played at love like other teenagers play at rebellion or popularity. I guess I could've chosen worse.

It's weird thinking about how many things changed in the years that came after this notebook. The boys I really fell for, the heartbreaks I really went through and all of the stuff that happened in between. 

Then there was the realization that not every poem needs to rhyme. That may have been the biggest discovery of all.