Love letters

Okay here is a poem I -- uh, found, somewhere. Yeah, I found it. It was written by someone I don't know at all. And I'm posting it on my blog because...ummm....

Okay okay so I wrote it. And I didn't even put it in Babelfish! Gasp. It's not very good but I started writing it when I was half asleep last night and freaking out about an odd pain in my leg, and I decided why not go ahead and actually write it. But! The content of this poem comes entirely from my vivid imagination, and not at all from my life. Do not assume that any of the examples apply to me. None of them do! They're completely fabricated.

Okay okay okay so maybe the Care Bears matchmaking one is real. But that's it!

(In all seriousness: there is a mixture.)

NOTE: Oh, yeah, the column here is kind of narrow, so not all of the line breaks are intentional. Sooo if you think a line break is bad -- just assume it wasn't really a break!

Anyway, poem:




If you die today
they will find everything.

The handcuffs tucked away in your bottom drawer;
the stories you never deleted from your computer,
from when you were eighteen and thought
that a ten minute sex scene needed fifty-seven pages
of heaving breaths and locked eyes
to be adequately expressed.
They’ll discover your notebook,
the little green one, from middle school,
where you recorded in detail your whole matchmaking scheme
for all the Care Bears
(and Care Bear Cousins);
and the pictures you swiped from the school yearbook pile of your crush,
just to gaze at them and feel your chest ache.
They’ll have to clean under your bed,
digging through a sea of Ruffles Potato Chip bags with just the crumbs left,
only to find dust hiding old underwear, and that one scandalous leather costume
you wasted a hundred dollars on
when you thought first loves lasted forever,
at least for you.
Your computer will be open to anyone curious,
looking for touching love letters in your gmail (with the saved password).
But all your chat log can reveal is your clinginess,
all the fights over nothing,
and they won’t understand,
because they weren’t there, late at night,
and those fights weren’t meant for them.
What will they think of your internet history?
You can’t tell them that a friend linked you to that hentai site as a joke – really!
Will they raise their eyebrows at each other, agreeing silently that they never really knew you?

They won’t see
all the thoughts that hover just out of your reach, in the dark
just before sleep,
when you’re so close to having something to say…but you don’t.
You’ve said nothing.
You’ve left nothing.
Nothing of the self you know you are.
You’ll become a jumble of embarrassing secrets with no one left to keep them.

If they want love letters,
they should dig through the drawers in your old room,
past hidden pad wrappers and ancient crumpled tissues,
past the Consumer-Reports-like rating system for all the boys in your class,
and open the handmade envelope addressed in careful cursive.
There they will find the shy love note that Sally finally wrote
to Encyclopedia Brown,
when she just couldn’t hold it in any longer.
At least, she would have written it, if you had your way:
Because no love, if it’s real,
should ever stay silent.