Just found this old poem, which I think I wrote during my Junior year of college!
An Ode to Something
For the weight of rain as it drenched my clothing
I couldn’t shake that chill for days on end
days I spent thinking that spring was almost here but just not enough to warm me yet. This is for the café where I spent most hours sipping at hot chocolates with shots of espresso in them and the conversations where we talked around our lives, playing
at the edges like children
skirting the banks of the lake. This is to that hill which always felt endless, one day I’ll be a kick-boxing champion because of that hill, one day I’ll hear my knees pop because of that hill, one day I’ll think back on that hill and wonder why I never bothered to check the view when I got to the top. This is for the shadows under the bridge where I
expected ghosts
would be telling stories to their friends, hushed voices carrying whispers that fill the heads of dreamers with nightmares of halls that just keep going and doors to rooms that appear from the dark where they weren’t ever supposed to be. This is to the music store where I’d buy CDs to fill my time with sound and the conversations that I’d overhear about guitarists and bandaged hands and vocalists who couldn’t keep track of the beat. This is for
Italian sodas on the way
to work and how the walk has worn my shoes down so that I feel the sidewalk through them and it always feels like I’m walking the footsteps of a thousand other people. This is to the click of a keyboard and that certain tap that the mouse makes when I hit refresh and the page blooms into something else. This is for the way the sky looked and the way the lake patterned out past my vision and became a blur and the way that cafe music always sounds best from right outside the door when I’m going in. This is, finally, to everything that I can’t quite recall with certainty but sits in my memory as some small pieces which one day will come back to
me suddenly
and absolutely, like stones I collected as a child and only find now, years later as I pack and they sit there at the bottom of boxes just waiting for me to pick them back up and place them somewhere new.