Get Over It

Still feeling sick, although better than before. Consequently, I am confined to the house. Self-imposed quarantine. I have been writing all of my final papers and reading random poetry to occupy my time.

I was looking at the American Poems website this morning and all of a sudden I remembered an essay I had written in high school, a fictitious account in which I met Emily Dickinson. It was one of those falling-asleep-while-writing-a-paper-on-Emily-Dickinson-and-waking-up-back-in-time-totally-plagiarized-from-Twain's-Connecticut-Yankee-idea stories, and from what I remember, I encouraged her to come out of her shell and live a little. You know, leave the house once in a while. God, I wish I still had a copy of that.

Come to think of it, that seems to be a theme of my high school writing. Another English teacher assigned us an essay in which we were supposed to take two characters from the books we had read and fictionalize a meeting between them. I made Pilate Dead from Song of Solomon meet Laura Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie, and naturally, Pilate told Laura to suck it up and have some confidence.

Maybe I was meant to be a motivational speaker, and not a writer.