Something old, something new...

Something that's very obviously not poetry.

I don't think I've been very direct about the... er.... direction of this blog, so I'm going to say this outright: I'm taking a fiction course, and I will be writing fiction intensively for the next three months. No poetry. I've honestly been drifting towards fiction in the past year or so, probably since NaNoWriMo, and while I still very much enjoy poetry, there are paths in fiction that I want to explore more thoroughly, and I have tons ideas for short fiction pieces/ longer fiction pieces. Is that to say that I won't be posting any poetry in the near future? No, but just don't expect it.

So now on to something more relevant to the title.

Several years ago, I wrote a poem based on my very first memory in honor of some birthday. I think it was my 19th? Whatever. I wrote a poem. It's the poem on my most popular post (woooo!), but for those of you unwilling or unable to click on a link, here's just a copy of it:

First Memory

Verdant shuffle, fresh from sleep.
Day unplanned save planned caprice,
Free from obligations to keep,
Time obliging only to creep,
Not too old for inner peace,
Every quandary tends to cease
At inception. None are deep.

I round the corner, put my fist
On a wall of mirrors, every shade
Reflected as to not resist
My acknowledging them in list. 
But soon was a connection made
Between myself, and one thought stayed:
“This is me. I exist.”

I obviously wasn't thinking in such flowery terms, but this was definitely how it went down.

And now for something newer.

Tuesday I had my first in-class exercise for my Creative Writing Senior Seminar (wtf how did I get so old, anyway?) and so we were given a prompt pertaining to an early memory and then wrote in our notebooks for about 15 minutes. I'm really digging the whole idea of writing more physically in a notebook rather than in a Word Doc, but then again I've always preferred it that way. And so here is my piece in all its 15-minute glory.


I don't know why, but I remember it was a Tuesday morning. My room was at the end of the hall, and the carpet was so green it resembled turf. I would always play on that carpet because it seemed more real. 

I wasn't very old ,but I knew the concept of opening a door, twisting my wrist around a knob I barely could reach. My fingers must had been previously in my mouth, because they were slippery and made my grip weak and awkward.

My little wispy curls bounced as I waddled out of my room. This was before my hair was ever cut, so the strands must have been there from the time I was born. My hair curled up at will on the ends, changing their size and place whenever I slept. And I passed my parents' room and Lala's room, the room I would graduate to when I became a big girl and had no need for the nursery.

I passed the brown and white sofa set in the living room. They looked like cows or horses, and I would straddle their armrests and neigh or moo for them. I would take off their cushions and pretend they were pelts or hides to make a fort. The cushions were stiff, and the naugahyde was prickly, but I had never seen a cow or a horse in real life, so I figured that was what they felt like.

And then there were mirrors. Some were bigger than me, all cast in frames and different shapes and sizes. Every time my mother went to Colombia she would come back with one or five. They were spaced unevenly along the wall, but I knew my mother must have had some method to it that I didn't understand yet.

I would look at the dust gathering in the crevices of the frames, pretend the mirrors were talking to each other, imagining what they would say. I never looked at the mirrors themselves because their frames were more alluring. Besides, many of them were too high for me to look at at eye level.

But one of them today was. It must have been the new one. My mother had just come back from Colombia. She would go there to see where she had come from what she was, she would later tell me. And there I say myself for the very first time in the mirror. This must be what I looked like, what I looked like to others.