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Penny | Sep 14 2006

A girl I knew thirty years ago, Pennysue, just sent me a thick folder of poems I wrote when I was fifteen. Most are love poems, of the painfully unrequited variety, all addressed to her. Evidently I loved her then.

My first reaction is disbelief: “I didn’t write these things. I couldn’t have.”

Granted, the handwriting seems familiar, but the words I don’t recognize. They state, again and again, that I loved her, in the frank and desperate way one loves at that age. Could this have happened? Did I love her and forget loving her?

Then I remember a conversation I had with my father. This was during the six months or so I lived with him (a desperate move I engineered solely to escape from my first high school, where I had amassed an insurmountable number of gym make-ups, having cut gym for an entire year straight). We talked on my father’s couch, just after I hung up with Pennysue, who confessed she liked another boy, to which I cried, sobbed really, saying I only wanted her to be happy. My father overheard this part (it was a small apartment) and decided we needed to talk.

“Never take no for an answer,” he said. “Girls want you to fight for them.”

I know where we sitting when he said this, and I know he was talking about Pennysue, so I know it must be true: I loved her. This means, among other things, that the poems are mine.

The poems. I haven’t counted how many there are, but there are a lot. I wrote them in the two-month period leading up to my sixteenth birthday. I often wrote two or three a day, writing on lined paper torn from a spiral notebook (the edge of the pages are jagged). Most appear to be copied in my best hand, although some, evidently originals, are littered with cross-outs and corrections and little arrows indicating line order changes.

Also: they’re dreadful—possibly the worst poems I’ve ever read.

When Penny emailed me last week (she found me while Googling a girl we both knew, who I referenced in an Oblivio piece), she mentioned the poems in her first email. I was floored, having believed all my juvenilia lost. Further, I was amazed that Pennysue had saved these poems for thirty years. And now that I’ve read them, the mystery deepens, for they are stunningly bad: repetitive, corny, and clichéd. However—and this perhaps explains everything—there is also something beautiful in their sincerity, the sincerity of a fifteen-year-old suffering his first heartbreak.

The first poem in the pile:

A Penny For Your Thoughts

I’ve been watching the sunset
Falling behind the sea
Listening to my headset
Discovering more of me

We’ve been getting closer
I feel a need for you
You’re setting off my emotions
Running me through and through

And it’s beginning to scare me
I want you more each day
I can’t look right at you
I can’t stand feeling this way

Why can I talk to you
Tell you my deepest dreams
Show what I have inside me
Even the weakest seams

I doubt you’ll ever see this
It could change your mind
And ruin our friendship
Change the sands of time

Or maybe you know already
Maybe you always knew
Lying across the vast wasteland
I want there to just be you