In June, I posted an old diary entry and followed it up a few days later by asking if anyone would be interested in a public Tumblr group for that kind of thing. Nobody really showed any interest, so I’m posting this here. I found it tucked into the pages of an old diary; it’s a poem that a guy I dated briefly in college wrote for/about me:
“Marcela”
A flock of sparrows bursting from the tree;
disturbed from slumber by a gunshot.
Any confidence or surity in life
shattered the moment she trod upon the plain,
the moment she entered the waving grasses
and listened to the whispering in the wind.The clear and tranquil pond that was my mind, my heart
Just got a boulder dropped into it.
Clouds of silt, dirt, and panicked tadpoles
drift about beneath the surface, the waves from the impact still echoing
throughout my mind.
Beautiful, glowing, glittering coy (sic) fish,
Oddities from the depths,
dayglo greens, blues, and reds radiating attention-seeking energy.
And creatures, monsters, demons long buried in the silt
All rise to the surface, not quite bursting through,
yet making their presence and strife known.They begin to quarrel, pummelling each other to no end,
creating great waves that crash and beat in turn upon
the shoreline.This pond will never be the same.
A few years ago, Adam and I were visiting family in South Florida. We took a trip to the Sawgrass Mills mall and I bumped into this guy. He was with a really cute girl and I was happy to see him doing well. The last time I’d seen him, he was on academic probation and sitting in the FIU cafeteria skipping classes to play Magick the Gathering.
Understandably, he wasn’t exactly happy to see me and when we parted ways, I turned to Adam and said “yeah, I kinda fucked up his life for a little bit back in college …” It felt kind of self-centered to say something like that, but now that I read this poem again, I wasn’t exactly off the mark.
