Take Me Back

As I was digging through our “room of shame” last night, looking for my empty Christmas tubs, to FINALLY put away the tree, I happened upon one filled with some of my old stuff. Laying on top were 3 notebooks, first a small green journal sized one, the second a teal standard smead notebook and the third one covered with random magazine clippings that had been set into a collage on the cover. The teal and collage notebooks were full of “notes” that my best friend and I had written back and forth to each other throughout my sophmore year in HS. The smaller notebook was my writing journal from my creative writing class. It’s chock full of a HS girl’s best writing, poems, streams of thought, everything. What a time warp that ended up to be.

As I thumbed through the notebook, I could feel what it was like sitting in that class, one of my favorites, actually. We had a young teacher, who was always dressed in a slightly hippy manner, perfect for creative writing. I could remember what each exercise she had us do was as I turned the pages. There was the day we brought in music and just wrote down everything that came to mind as we listened, our What is project, where we wrote poems based on government, music and other general subjects. My favorite though, was our stream of consciousness. Anything and everything that you though you wrote, mine was 3 pages full. I wish I could go back to that class, I truly miss writing…

Toward the back of the notebook, I also found a poem I had written to Brian, long before he and I ever were a couple. It amazed me that even 11 years ago I must have known we were destined for each other. I’ll post the poem up sometime later, but the feelings it brought back were amazing. I didn’t say anything to him about how it made me feel, though I did have him read it. He didn’t really react, but I don’t know what I was expecting him to say or do anyway. It probably means more to me because I know what I felt when I wrote it and to him, they’re just words.

I’m starting to be inspired to write again, I’m hoping I can take the time to do it. One of the assigments in the book had a note from my teacher that said “Jen, I expect great things from you. You have the desire to write, more than others…and I expect you to try and be published someday”. Throughout life we wait to know that someone thinks we’re good at what we’re doing, I had it handed to me 11 years ago and didn’t do anything with it. I was *going* to go to school for writing, I was just *going* to work for a year first and then go to college…somehow life got in the way of that. I can’t go back and fix it and I may have to do some serious searching to find what was alive in me back then.