I know this is probably a waste of time and it’s definitely stupid but I’m sitting here in my apartment—the rent just went up again which is its own kind of madness for a place this small—and I can’t stop thinking about these papers I found last week. I had to go back to the old neighborhood to finally clear out that back room in the house my sister is selling and it was like walking into a tomb, just dust and that smell of old cedar and damp plaster that you can’t ever really get out of your nose even after you leave. I found this stack of papers tucked behind the radiator, real old-school yellow legal pads, and they were covered in my handwriting from when I was seventeen and I didn’t even recognize the person who wrote them at first. It’s not a big deal but I stayed there on the floor for three hours reading every single word while the sun went down and the room got cold. I was writing to a girl named Elena who lived three doors down and she never knew, she never had a clue that I was spending my nights documenting every time she breathed in my direction or the way she tucked her hair behind her ear. The poems are... they’re hard to read because the level of emotional dysregulation is just staggering. I’m 76 now looking at this kid who thought he was a poet but really he was just suffering from a massive case of unrequited limerence, just a total fixation on a girl who barely said hello to me in the hallway. I wrote that her smile was a "supernova that scorched my very marrow" and I used words like ETERNAL and SHATTERED every other sentence. It’s so overly dramatic that it’s almost funny but it’s mostly just sad because I can still feel that tightness in my chest when I read them, that physical ache of wanting something you can't have. I remember the day I wrote the longest one, the one where I compared her to a Greek goddess who had the power to unmake me with a glance. I was sitting on the bus coming back from the library and I saw her through the window, she was just standing at a crosswalk eating an apple and I felt this surge of what I now realize was just basic neurochemical flooding, but back then it felt like a religious experience. I never even sent them—I just kept them in that stack, dozens of pages of me begging the universe to make her see me—and I’m sitting here now at 2am thinking about how much energy I spent on a ghost. I’ve lived a whole life since then, I have three kids who think I’m this rock, this stable old man who never had a flight of fancy in his life, and if they saw these they wouldn’t even believe it was me. My oldest son is a lawyer and he’s so practical and I wonder if he has a secret stack of papers somewhere too, or if he’s just better adjusted than I was. I look at the traffic down on 5th Avenue and I think about how many people are walking around with these secret histories, these pathetic little shrines to people who didn't even like them back. It’s just this weird feeling of cognitive dissonance to see your own handwriting talking about wanting to DIE because a girl didn't look at you during a pep rally. I wrote one where I said my soul was a "hollowed-out cathedral" waiting for her to walk inside and I just... I want to reach back through time and tell that boy to just go for a walk or get a hobby but I know he wouldn't have listened. He was too busy being the protagonist of his own tragedy. My wife passed seven years ago and she was the love of my life, the real thing, the steady and quiet kind of love that builds houses and raises families, but these poems... they aren't about her. They’re about a girl I don't even think I liked, I just worshipped the IDEA of her. It’s that old psychological concept of cathexis, where you just pour all this mental energy into an object until it doesn't even represent a person anymore, just a vessel for your own loneliness. I probably should have burned them but I brought them back to the city with me and they're sitting on my nightstand right now next to my heart medication. It’s pathetic, I know. This is all so stupid and I’m an old man who should be thinking about his legacy or his taxes or the fact that the radiator is clanking again, but instead I’m mourning a version of myself that was so desperately, beautifully stupid. The city is so loud tonight and I can hear someone arguing downstairs and I just feel this crushing weight of time, like those yellow pages are heavier than they look. I’m 76 years old and I’m still that boy in the back bedroom, waiting for someone to read the things I’m too afraid to send. It doesn't mean anything in the long run but god, it hurts to remember how much I was capable of feeling before I got so TIRED.