i spent all weekend clearing out my old room at my parents house theyre selling the place moving to a retirement community small one bedroom place they dont need all this junk anymore and i dont either i guess but it was MY junk my childhood bedroom all this stuff i just kept moving around for fifty something years some of it was just boxes of papers school reports drawings you know the usual stuff but then i found this stack of notebooks tied with a ribbon a faded red ribbon i remember it being bright once and inside poems so many poems to this girl susan from high school she barely knew i existed honestly i thought she was everything the whole world my whole world i wrote about her eyes her hair the way she laughed at other peoples jokes the way the light hit her just right on the bus ride home they were BAD truly awful overly dramatic full of all these feelings i just couldnt manage back then i never showed them to her never sent them thank god really she probably wouldve laughed at me or been totally weirded out but reading them it brought back this pang this ache not for susan really i mean ive got three kids grown kids mostly theyre doing okay mostly but this feeling like i missed something like i held onto all that so long never let it go never really put myself out there not like that anyway my wife she died ten years ago cancer bad one i work odd jobs now freelance stuff always hustling never enough never really stable and i just sit here looking at these stupid poems i wrote them from the heart a kids heart a stupid heart and i wonder if i ever really got that back that raw feeling that everything i should just throw them away burn them maybe let them go but i cant im still sitting here it's almost 3am my phone is practically dead and i just keep flipping through them reading the words the promises i made to myself to her to some version of the future that just never happened