Communicating my thoughts and feelings through writing has not always been my strongest skill, but it has been a cathartic release for me from a young age.
While packing up my bedroom at my parents’ house over the Christmas break, I came across an old notebook I’ve owned for years.
It’s a pretty little hand-stitched number from Paperchase that I bought many, many moons ago.
As teenagedom hit with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the emotions began running amock, I took solace in the pages of this notebook.
I always fancied myself as a poet or novelist, and unfortunately I was less than talented in the poetry department.
For today’s Throwback Thursday, I thought I’d share some of the greater works (and by greater I mean those that induced the most stomach-churning cringe) of my adolescence.
Fact and Fiction
Sometime I feel like a character from a book
with no choice of path.
It seems to me that
we are all characters from God’s latest novel.
It seems to me
that we are all characters from God’s new best-seller
Apparently I was struggling with religion…
Act I Scene III
You’re the Lady Macbeth
of today.
Your tongue is your dagger
You seek revenge, need to
satiate your thirst.
Your anatomic sword pierces
hearts; spilling tears and
killing dreams.
Bloodlust courses through your veins
and yet you lie
ever silent, ever dreaming,
until the day the dagger
plunges.
It would also appear I was both ridiculously pissed off with someone and had a flare for (what I considered at the time to be) dramatic structure. Thank God there are no rhyming couplets or I’d be at this page with a rubber and a lot of elbow grease…
And, God Almighty, I seemed to think I could write humour into my ‘poetry’:
Optimism
My glass is half full
of an exciting new drink
that colours my day.
Optimism is
the new pessimism but
more optimistic
Give me strength.
One of the final entries in this notebook is also a short one, but it has a lot more meaning to me. And yes, this one rhymes:
Roses are red
violets are blue
I cannot fathom
this world without you.
Yellow’s for daisies
purple’s for heather
I’ll love you and miss you
forever and ever
I wrote that in 2012. It was the first Valentine’s Day after one of my dearest friends died in a car crash. It was such a devastating time for me. Probably fuelled a lot more angst, but fortunately I stopped writing so much poetry and focused my energy on journals and fiction. I can assure you they were better.
So, there you have it. I was an angsty wee thing, but God loves a trier.
There are still empty pages in this notebook, as time and other distractions left it sitting on the bookshelf for years. I am going to attempt to fill them all. No doubt there will be some angst still there – gotta get it out somehow – but I’m determined to finish this book on a happier note (and maybe without so much terrible, painful poetry).