Inescapable

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."

I really have come to love my English class,and the material that we have been covering for the past two weeks has really made an impact. I haven't had a genuinely wonderful English teacher in about 3 years, so this class has been unbelievably refreshing. I haven't read poems in quite a while, and throughout this whole week, I have been trying to remember the exact reason as to why I stopped reading them. I came to the conclusion that it was only because modern poetry got me so discouraged as to where Literature was going (a pitiful demise), so I suppose I just lost all hope in the matter. Anyways, I have been getting lost in the words of T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and E. E. Cummings.

When I was about 7 years old, my Father handed me a pile of books one Winter morning, and he told me they were books of poetry that his Mother used to read when she was young. The pages were crisp and yellow, and the necks were cracked and peeling. They smelled like the beautiful musky smell of a mixture of oak and age, if age could have a smell. On the cover was a young girl in a blue dress with white polka dots, with her short brown hair gathered in small pig-tails along the nape of her neck. She sat atop a small blue-green knoll and the wind blew through her hair, and to the artists' rendition, I could almost feel that same wind coming alive and swirling around me- touching just the very tip of my nose and back down around to the heels of my feet.

I sat in that old living room on Apache Court and, even now, the moods of Wintertime became so strangely vivid. As the smells of my Father's cacao beans filled the room, I cracked open the book, and this was the first T.S. Eliot poem that I had ever read.

"The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps."

Perhaps it was then that I fell in love with Literature, but it was the image of "the burnt-out ends of smoky days" and the ideal that hope comes shortly afterwards is what stayed with me forever.

But now, I feel like I'm trapped here in this place. I'm sick of suburbia, and I'm sick of the status quo, and I'm sick of the snobbish perpetuality that is Valencia. It feels like the longer I stay here, the more I am discouraged to follow what I want and dream of. I keep on feeling like there is so much potential coming from some deep crevice inside of me, but I'm too afraid of what they will think. The isolation is too much to bear. And for such a free-spirit, the fear of freedom is too dramatically ironic to even begin to grasp.

I don't want to become just a snubbed out flame among these burnt out days.