I wrote this during my sophomore year in high school.  It's short and simple yet so easily recalls with near inconceivable clarity those events which fashioned it in my mind and eventually to paper.

It's amazing how a simple writing such as this can be such a memoria technica, yet it's not surprising.  I've been writing for a long time and have always used it as catharsis concomitant with memorialization (hence the blog).  In this case, I remember the class I was sitting in and the other students who were seated around me and even what I was wearing (that being the terrifying part of this memory; what the hell were we thinking?).

I wrote this particular item during one of those unexceptional teen moments when the world was most certainly crushing in on me.  I was positive nothing could ameliorate the situation.  Everything in life was surely wrong; everything I did or tried ended in failure; woe is me…

Of course I would survive and the world had no intention of stopping what it was doing just to focus calamity on me, but you remember as well as I how dramatic teen life can be.  It's almost as if we would feed on our own drama.

Perhaps averring what I knew to be true even in such melodramatically desperate times, I wrote this.

help
supporting
yet sometimes unwillingly given
much needed
yet not enough to be given
one day you will need it
and realize
that no one is ready to give
until one person comes
ready

[circa 1986]