III.

At seventeen, I rekindled my love of poetry while sitting in a college dorm room scrolling through the musings of an internet poet. As you do. I had joyfully sighed at the likes of Frost, Whitman, Keats, and Cummings years before, but this was a new love – a relatable love, manifested in quiet recitations and teary eyes shared between the concrete walls of an outdated structure. It was beautiful, and it was fluid, and it was raw. It had power over more than a computer screen. And that is something I believe in.

So at eighteen, I picked up a pen, which quickly became laptop keys and I started writing poems. Of course, seventy percent are utter crap and twenty nine percent are nothing special. But I find now, as I did when first discovering those lines in a dorm room, that poetry has power. It is the breath of fresh air when the common tongue becomes stagnant. It is, if you will, the beauty of a whirlwind after an overbearing stillness. And it is the means I have found to put down my thoughts when I have no idea what I am thinking at all.

And you may have thought that it is what has sharpened my words while weakening my affinity for numbers. But no, that other one percent is accounted for in the first poem I ever wrote – my one masterpiece, if only for the subject matter. It stands out amongst my work as she stands out amongst all other figures in my life, the first spot of color in a black and white world.

My mother is a complicated woman, put on this earth, no doubt, for the benefit of many. Yet in the comfort and confines of my own mind, I often indulge in the thought that it was mainly for me – a totem to teach me love and loyalty, the boundaries of anger when it seems there are none, and the depths of grace. Someone to be my best friend and worst enemy conveniently tied into one package. Isn’t that just the funny thing about mothers? If only to be half the inspiration and double the frustration to someone as she has been to me. That would be a courtesy to her legacy. But when is becomes was in the stillness of a second (somewhere far down the line I do hope) perhaps all I will remember is my mother the saint: the woman who put stars in my eyes and a pebble in my shoes, who told me to dream but reminded me that when the discomfort arises of walking too long, home is a consistency where the shoes come off and the pretensions come down. “There’s a whole world out there, baby girl, so remember where you come from but go find your own piece of it.” Or your place in it.

Really, I think that as the years pass, it’s not the words so much that matter as the steady voice which spoke them, promising to be both a safeguard and a celebrant. In my twentieth year, antsy with this sentiment that I had indeed been still too long, I threw myself headfirst into my mother’s advice. Vowing to find my piece, or my place, or simply a story if that’s all this was destined to bring.