I’ve always loved writing. Ever since I was little, I’ve been thinking up stories and plotting novels that never made it past outlines or the first chapter. My mind was always racing, always trying to figure out what was coming next instead of staying in the now. When I started high school, I thought that I would go on to become an author. That maybe, one day, my name would appear on a best-selling novel. The thought of writing poetry never crossed my mind. Even though I enjoyed reading it on occasion, it was never really something I wanted to try. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that I took a poetry class. No further creative writing courses were being offered for the next term, and I figured that poetry was the next best thing. Oh, how I fell in love.

And oh, how I became incredibly frustrated. Every poem that we read— every poem that we wrote— rhymed. There were too many rules to poetry. Too many people to please, and only one voice to mimic. It felt robotic. I finished the class but strayed from poetry after that, wishing that there was more freedom in it. And guess what? There was. I just hadn’t discovered it yet.

My sophomore year of undergraduate studies, I took a poetry class with my favorite English professor. With three overly-large anthologies in my arms, and a bag filled with new notebooks and old, favorite pens, I entered into Charles O’Neill’s classroom in the back corner on the top floor of the farthest building on campus. We read Irish poetry and American classics. I daydreamed and doodled (sorry, O’Neill). Sometimes I would write little limericks in the margins of my notes. Despite what a wonderful teacher he was, it felt as though I were in that high school class all over again. And then, one day, he told us that we were going to begin a unit on free verse poetry.

He had my full attention then. Free verse poetry? What was that? Our third anthology consisted of poems that had little to no structure. There were no set stanzas, no proper formats, and no rhyming. There were no rules to follow except that of feeling and being, and as I filled pages and read through histories, poetry felt human again.

That’s the point of it all, ins’t it? To feel? To be? To exist and experience life in the most unapologetic ways?

I couldn’t stop writing after that course, but at the end of each term, it was always the same. I threw the poems out, along with the notebooks they resided in. They wouldn’t amount to anything— after all, I was writing for myself. No one would ever see them, and I didn’t have the space to keep notebooks that I would never return to for quotes from statistics and psychological studies that would soon be outdated.

I stopped writing from 2018 to 2020 all together. For three years I convinced myself that poetry— that writing in general— was nothing but a silly dream.

Dreams are funny that way, aren’t they?

Near the end of 2020, I took a chance and posted a poem to my Instagram account. For some reason, people liked it. People related to it. So I posted another poem a few weeks later. And then another poem a few weeks after that. As time moved on, I began to notice how you came to connect with what I had to say.

I never did get around to finishing that novel, but I have gotten to write a few poetry collections. And while they may not be best sellers, I’m tremendously proud of them.

Thank you, star-dusted souls, for your encouragement and support. I hope that you find a home in my poems, a familiar voice in my words, and a hand to hold as we wander through the woods beneath the moonlight, getting wonderfully lost together.