Poet’s Corner

There were two doors at the end of the hallway of my childhood home. I knew them both pretty well, though I had never gone through either of the two doors. To be honest, it wasn't like it was easy to pass through the two doors. Though it seemed they both wanted to be crossed, anybody that dared would get mysteriously crushed by them, metaphorically speaking. The first door, I had gazed at when I was 10, it was a very chaotic and loud door, yet I found myself drawn to it for I found it to be very beautiful. It was not without pain and though I tried to step into it, it seemed to kiss me with the tip of the thorniest rose that wrapped around the threshold of the door. Then I left for school, to a faraway land that taught me to love and taught me pain but somehow I made my way back at the age of 14 to that place with the door. But then I found that other door and oh was it beautiful. Sunshine seemed to be emitted from its door, and poems of love and joy carved into its wooden finishings, but it also smelled of the ocean and I could hear it from the other side. Alas, I thought I should walk through this door and find the happiness of my soul, but before I went to open the door and it would not open. I tried and tried and it wasn't just that it didn't open, it seemed to get further away from me every time I tried to see. Frustrated I gave up but still the door remained, for it seemed to love me too but only in a way in which one loves the stars but does not wish to be near them. So I went back ot the old corridors. There I found that thorny rose door that I had loved in my youth, and in my time away I confess I had grown rather at odds with this door, the scars on my hands left a pulsing ache in me. When I closed my eyes I could see its beauty, dark and gorgeous, oh so gorgeous like lying in a room full of burning roses and I was fire too so I loved to burn. But even though it was open enough to love me through torment, it was not a stable place to live. It seemed to seek to remind me of how much they hated loving me. I began to long for the door that would never open, but behind it all I gazed at its ocean behind it. Now I find myself in a conundrum. Which door do I love? Which door should I wait for? So many questions and I do not know the answer

Then I came upon a room in the newest wing of the house where I grew up in, it was something like the tales of asylums that I had heard my mother talk about. It seemed nobody would ever dare enter, for it fractured the mind into pieces and unless you had a pen to write it back into order, nobody ever was the same. Given that the two other doors were not able to be entered, and as such the old part of the house was for the most part unable to be inhabited, yet it seemed it was for I swear sometimes I heard inklings of sounds of life in there. Perhaps it was the ghosts of the previous dwellers of the doors when they had once been opened. The thorny rose door was the only one that I could have dwelled in had I tried, but I felt myself compelled to leave it behind, perhaps it was my place once but I believed it was time for me to realize that humans are ever changing beings including myself and that if I considered that place to be me than perhaps I was limiting myself to never discovering what I could be. I think I wanted it to be it because part of me believes that of myself that the only love I can have is the chaotic hateful entity that I believe myself sometimes to be. Perhaps a part of me wants to believe there's a part of me that isn't a wielder of words and that my true self would be something besides that, because then that intensity that I have in my writing is something that I would not lose even if I stopped writing.

The newest wing of the house, I nicknamed "Poet's Corner" because it was built for the wielder of words to have a place to not torment the rest of society with their ability to see beyond. It's the being detached from reality to be able to create such distinct worlds that ot the rest of the world surely you must be mad because where outside of reality can you gain such an ability? The new wing was bright white, blinding almost at times, and I felt myself compelled to sleep most of the time because of that. There was a lake near it, a place where I could wander among the hills and find myself and write and write, my writing became my medicine a way to cure my thoughts. In one such day, I found a boy who was also in the wing with me, he was a lot more in the world than I was and I began to realize perhaps it wasn't meant for poets to be sad but that's what society wanted us to be because I believe it is innately human to want to believe that if you're so in touch with your reality than you mustn't be able to write it down because writing is for the ones who are mad. He was a bit mad I will admit, and he had lovers many times, and he had been a lot more successful at it than I was perhaps he had not been as rash as I was with my writing. I began to admire him, his poetic essence blended with the scents of nature. I had known him for two years, and watched him fail at his other loves, I believed he sought it so badly that ever-encompassing feeling of love and when each one did not give that he fled, now he's been alone for a while. Tho I heard there was another of his lovers, briefly over the summer who seemed to have been the one, it was one he had found in the doors corridors, and yet it proved to be almost as impossible as it was for me to enter the sunshine door. He told me recently, it would be mortifying to see them again, and I told him of how I felt the same about seeing the sunshine door.

I believed he was a lot more content than I was about dismissing his own depth to enter into conversation with what I deemed outsiders, tho I had a best friend. I deemed every connection that wasn't rooted in my soul as fleeting and unable to be constantly maintained and then I blamed myself for being heavily disliked. I understood why he seemed to not know me when they were around, but over the past few months, things have gotten strange between us. The doors were still there for a bit, and I kept him by my side so I would be able to gaze at his beauty. But I do not believe myself capable of finally being able to have someone, but he's treating me differently. While he's always been a flirt, I feel his touches on my back and our hands touching ever so casually as a thousand fires spreading through my brain. His laugh and gaze pierce my soul, and tho I've tried to maintain that casualness of feeling because he's not my past, he's something new and not upheld by past heartbreaks and perhaps part of me feels like if it's not an existential yearning or mutual obsession, a connection can't be maintained. I know I've been telling people, he's been ignoring me but it's not like I've tried to engage with him recently, the sunshine door ingrained in me that conversation between. lovers has to be a monumental occasion for it to be engaging otherwise you'll get silence. That I cannot engage with him unless he engages first, even though I know he's not like the sunshine door, he's more like me than I would want to admit. He represents the me that isn't so afraid to admit they're a human rather than just a poet. It feels like real life rather than a tragic novel to which I'm accustomed. Yet I also know he has that depth without darkness.

Though I have known him for almost three years by now, it is only recently that I have had the pleasure of reading his work. When I read it, I felt stabbed, like someone had plagiarised my work and decided to make it their own. His use of elevated descriptions and the way he describes things by using metaphors for them, like everything in this world is interconnected, that a tree in the woods , isn't just a tree, it's like a lonely soul among lonely souls stretching themselves to be able to have a glimpse of the light or joy that humans want. He writes about physical nature, I write about human nature. His works do not pertain to the loves he has had, but rather his perception of the world around him, like a biologist recording data from the environment. I use nature to describe the elements of my own connections with people and the world, for I am that biologist to describe nature, I would use the scientific terms for them. I think it's an interesting foil between the two of us, he's the poet who writes nature, and I am the scientist who writes poetry.

I wonder if that's why he has not gone mad, he's able to see the beauty in nature in abstract ways, but I am so attuned with the way nature is just nature's poem made of math and science, and then humans now there's beauty in that we are the things that break apart from the numbers that dome nature.

Part of me wants him to learn about love the way that I know it, that blazing forest fire in our lungs that consumes everything in its path. The cells in our body suddenly get haywired because you're reminded you're alive. I believe that's why he never really writes about love, tho maybe he has but I venture to say he hasn't, he wants to find that sense of overwhelming beauty in the world because he feels real human feelings would never quite hold that. But does he not see that if human emotions were a gene, their talima's d value would be so negative that it would seem whoever can love best wins in natural selection. But love is like a self-incompatibility gene, it wants to change constantly so that no two equal things could ever interact and limit the diversity of human emotions, it fluctuates the way we fluctuate from birth until we die, it is constantly trying to make every human find their other half in such a way that it is perfectly unique to them two. Rather than the same repeating never-ending story of sameness.

I do not want to claim tho, that I am that person for him, but still I feel that the strange paths of our lives have brought him and me together. That if we ever write something of value and finally can afford to leave this asylum, then our names would be forever in conversation for we learn it together. The sunshine and thorny rose door will be characters in my story, but it will never truly be about them if he is there. For people will know of him too, and I've always loved the interconnectedness of nature, and the motifs and moments in mine will be threaded with the ones in his.

Now tho, we are both still in this asylum, and we've finally, or at least I, finally have the ability to love again properly. If our paths had crossed before, the sunshine and thorny rose door's pull would be too strong and no true connection would have been forged, as is the case for him too. Yet now, if we allowed ourselves to go mad together, than a true new ecosystem would be in place, for that's what i believe happens when two poets love each other, they both have their own manipulation of the climate and the living and non-living factors in it, of what can be sustained there, and than when blended if it's meant to be it will disrupt both of them so much that it would instill a new type of ecosystem, maybe even a new biosphere.

I wonder then, if in a thousand years, historians analyse my poems and stories, and know that I knew him and he knew me. I wonder if our works will be forever in conversation. In truth, I love that idea, because that means that my poems and stories and his poems and stories, will never be alone. Now even if I gaze back to look, Eurydice has her own way of singing her way out of the underworld. Our love, unlike the loves that I have had before, could truly be one that, even when he and I are gone, remains.