opening

there's something about creative writing teachers that seems to continue resonating in my life.

kay merrell, my creative writing teacher from high school (and probably one of the best women i will ever meet aside from my mother and a handful of other women, of course.) is one of them. and i write her name, hoping that maybe one day she'll google herself, and see this post. i'd be flattered if she read it. i hope she'd be flattered, too. i owe a lot of things to the woman who had a love for billy collins and told us stories of paris and new york and penny lane. my love of poetry, for one.

at the end of each semester, she would give us a trinket marbles for the first semester, a rock for the second and with each seemingly useless knicknack not useless to me, mind you, a poem of infinitely useful worth would come forth. i leave you with an excerpt from a poem that she wrote.

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Years later
I still believe "good" and "bye"
are never meant to hold hands,
so I leave you with "good"
in a whispering stone.
My eyes will continue to dance
with days of wild writing
when our tiger tongues
found their prey,
those victimed words we greedily devoured,
tasting what we wanted to understand.
Place this in your road-mapped palm
where destiny lines are as endless
as London rains
and possibility peeks between each crevice.

Listen.

It will always spill its rambling secrets,
sun-streaked afternoons of watery laughter and inky memories
with a woman worn smooth
from too much loving.

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perfect. it's exactly how good and bye should be explained.
it's the good that i leave with you.

you don't know who you are.
but i do.

and hopefully one day you'll realize. there is no bye to these words of mine which have endless meaning. only good. and i hope the good that i leave with you can one day blossom into something better.

something marvelous.