"I Think I made you up inside my head"

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head)
Mad Girl's Love Song, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

I'll be frank: I hate poetry.

I always have. I don't feel like my sentiments will change anytime soon. I'm much more swayed by prose; the depth, the plots, the beauty of character. I feel like all you ever get in poetry is snippets of half baked characters from the written oven. It's even more horrible when poetry is crammed down your throat every day in a class. All the hidden meanings and made up B.S. just bothers me. Maybe the poet just wanted to add the detail in without it being of any significant meaning? Or maybe I am just a really untalented poetic mind.

Searching through the given poems for this weeks assignment, I stumbled upon Plath's "Made Girl's Love Song" and the moment Mrs. Solano always talked about, when the poetry "speaks to you," it actually happened. Although we were assigned to write a formal response cuffed with a personal response, in any academic ground, you're never actually able to really speak on behalf of your thoughts: they're never quite eloquent enough, or even worse, they are probably wrong.

One of my many faults as a still learning youngin' is the fact that in my mind of endless imagination, I take the basic character of the people around me, and I spend immense amounts of time compiling the information around me from books and my own crazy thoughts to turn them into something they really aren't. In my mind, I can turn an obnoxious, egotistical, class clown into an attentive man who needs someone to listen to him and to really get to know him. Of course, he really is what he appears at face value, but I make the mistakes to put the idea of him into something grander, something worth a story, a book, a movie. Which can really be painful. especially when I attach myself to the idea of a person I've made inside of my head, and when I slowly 'fall in love' (God I hate that phrase, can someone in the world come up with a new way to say such an annoying, trite sentiment) with that image in my head, it never really ends well.

And maybe that's what else really captured my about the poem. The devastation of the speaker. The feeling of anger towards the person who caused it, but the inward guilt of that I really was the one who caused it all in the first place. Maybe if I could have just not attached myself, not expected things to go another way, maybe not have even thought the thoughts that caused to much damage, things would have been better. Which is basically how I live my life, even outside of the romantic. I feel as though I regret to much and never make decisions that ever really please me. Maybe it's because I'm still young and the output of the input hasn't been shipped out yet. But just the regret and the guilt of so many things. It's difficult. I need to get over it. I need to get over a lot of things. I mean, there are still things from seventh grade and even elementary school that can get me shaken up if I really think back to them. Why did I do that, Why did I have to make a fool of myself, Why didn't I do that, blah blah blah.

Our instructor in marching band has always had interesting things to say about life. Today, as motivation for marching band, we need to be more pumped up (not necessarily for marching band) for life. Just to wake up and enjoy being alive, and the stupid little things like a new album coming out and listening to it in the car. Maybe I should just get over the fact that people leave and that I build up my expectations of people to much. I should just get over it all and wake up and feel excited to be alive and for another day to have a busy schedule filled with people I could probably like if I actually put more effort into liking them, but that's another blog.

But I still hate poetry.

To remember.

Ahhh. Fresh new blog smell. Hmmm what to write, oh what to write. You must excuse my lack of cohesive thought and just roll with it, because I feel that it's just time to throw up words on a new word document for a shining new blog.

I've found myself pondering the idea of memory and memories increasingly more often lately. After AP Bio last year and only skimming the surface of memory, my naturally curious self has spent hours obsessing over the complexities of memories. Just the thought that everything is more of a memory than actual action; the present is so finite that before you can even think about it, time has already marched on the the past. So why do we remember what we remember? I can recall perfectly an evening when I walked up to a restaurant in silence while I considered the concepts of present and past for one of the first times, but I have to strain myself to remember what I even had for dinner last night. I can hardly even recollect the exact details of my first kiss, but the memory of my 6th grade crush telling me he liked someone else is still fresh in my mind. I can see the scene, I can hear his voice, see his face. I had only liked him for what, 2 months? But I can see every moment of those few minutes perfectly. My first kiss, though as important as it is supposed to be, brings only vague thoughts of time and place, but not details. I never intended to keep the memory of a 6th grade boy telling me he liked someone else locked up, and I feel nothing for it, but I remember it. When it happened, my 8th grade self wanted to swoon and tenderly remember everything of my first kiss, but now all I can think of was a ferris wheel, a band trip, and cheering friends below.

Even though most of the memories I try to keep are only fleeting, there's always been one memory (of maybe a handful) that I have forced myself to keep. Now, as a full high school career marching band member, I've been on more bus rides than I even know, going to competitions and football games, and general band things, but there was one evening we were going to a football game. The sun had set in a weird part of the fall sky that turned everything pink. The sky, the cheeks of my fellow flutes and clarinets on our bus, the freeway, the buildings. Even the light had a new quality, as if it was infused with a mist of bustling energy that made every single laugh and smile on the bus seem increasingly more genuine and beautiful. Everything really was beautiful and nothing was wrong. The windows were open and my hair flew around me and Sarah's hair flew in my face and we laughed, Michael said something in his unnaturally deep voice for the bus filled with mainly girls, Elizabeth serenely stared off into space as everyone of the people that I spent day after day with sat bathed in pink light. It was a moment of pure euphoria, a moment when truly nothing was wrong, or at least not that I can remember. I sat in that bumpy school bus seat and gazed out at the pink sky, and I thought to myself 'I cannot let myself ever forget this moment.'

My mom has told me before that before I began Kindergarten, I could remember every moment of my life up to that moment, and once school started, my brain just dumped all those precious thoughts. With school as chaotic as it is, with formulas needing to be memorized for AP physics to such critical thought in every other AP class, I fear for what my memory will continue to be. I put so much into school, and I worry that one day I will be nothing but school, no more memories, no more internal imagery, no more pink sunsets on the dreariest of days.

But then again, Mrs. Solano gives me hope. On a total whim in AP English today, we got her talking about her love story with her husband. Even though school has only been in session for around three weeks, I can already see much of her personality in myself. Not that that really matters for the topic, but she told us about how she had known her husband since she was 7, and when she was 11, she specifically remembered telling herself that she would marry him one day. 20 years and many breakups and makeups later, she did marry him. She told us that she still has memories of all of those years, while he has a mostly blank memory, scattered with the 'important things.' It touched me that she could still remember so much of such a long story in such detail, but I couldn't get over the tinge of sadness that fought me inside when she said he wouldn't remember certain things.

Maybe what I really wanted to like about the story was that in 20 years, I'll look back on now and I'll still remember all the things that are so important to me now. I don't want to look back on my high school life and see it in as much of a blur as my first little kiss. I want to think back vividly on all the wonderful and horrible emotions that bless and curse me now, I want to remember. I want to remember eating crepes and walking under winter mall lights, I want to remember the winter picnics on a dead grassy hill, the ice skating, the movie days, taking time on the couch and outside under the trees. I want to remember feeling in love and I don't want to look back on it as if it was a trivial pursuit that meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. Mostly, just because I know my future self would know my anger of condescending the feelings of present day me. But don't listen to me, I'm getting back into my radical notions of time again.