Get to the Point, Kid.

I want to be by myself, sometimes I do.
I don’t want to be left behind, but sometimes I’m left by you.

So what is this weather, and what is this darkness,
and why do I feel so alone?
When will it snow, it’s been raining for hours,
and why do I feel so alone?

… you pretend to defend me and lend me your heart
Saying “I know you’re no angel, but this is a start”.
And this is the part I’ve been meaning to share…
If you can’t love me here, then you can’t love me there

So spare me the self- righteous preamble.
Get to the point, kid. You’re starting to ramble. 

Calculate the interstate, and you do the best that you can
Simplify the distance and don’t change your plan.
Keep your eyes wide and tried
Cherish change to be true

Your time is coming and mine’s coming, too.

Author’s Note:
Originally written: January 19, 2005 -  Loneliness, Language, and the Parts I Learned to Cut Out

I found an old version of myself today, folded into the lines of a poem I barely even remember writing, but I remember the feeling. I remember the way my body held it. That restless, buzzing intensity under my skin, like something inside me was too big for where it was being kept. I remember saying my veins felt like they were on fire when I wrote it, and now I understand that a little differently. Back then, it wasn’t something I could name. It just felt like too much… too many emotions, too loud, too fast, like my body was trying to hold something my mind couldn’t organize yet. I just knew it was urgent. Loud. Something I couldn’t ignore. Like if I didn’t let it out, it would swallow me whole. Something in me knew I was feeling deeply in places that weren’t being met. 

Seeing it in its original form with the spacing, the emphasis, the parts I underlined, the line I crossed out, and especially what I chose to highlight in red... it feels less like reading a poem and more like watching my younger self edit herself in real time. The underlined sentence practically screams, This is important. Please don't miss this part. It feels desperate in a way that breaks my heart now. Not desperate for attention, but desperate to be understood. The red text feels entirely different. The black text is emotional, questioning, and vulnerable. It asks. It wonders. It hurts. The red text interrupts. It corrects. It almost sounds older, like it doesn't belong to me, but rather something I'm repeating back after being told it enough times. Like criticism I had already absorbed and turned inward. I've written many times about learning early that my feelings were inconvenient, too big, too emotional, too much. Looking at this poem now, I can see both voices existing side by side. There is the child trying to speak, and there is the voice telling her to hurry up, get to the point, stop rambling, and make herself easier to understand. What stands out to me most is that this isn't simply expression. It is interruption. The poem contains its own editor. Its own critic. Its own audience. I crossed out the repeated line, and why do I feel so alone? as though saying it once should have been enough, as though saying it twice made it excessive. But reading it now, I can feel how badly I needed to ask it again. That wasn't rambling. That wasn't redundancy. That was emphasis. That was a girl trying to make someone, anyone, understand the weight of what she was carrying. I know now that I didn't actually understand what I was feeling yet. Teenagers often write poems to explain their emotions. This poem does the opposite. It circles them. It returns to them. It asks the same questions repeatedly because the answers never arrive. And perhaps that’s what makes the formatting feel so important. They are not decorative choices. They are evidence. They show a young writer simultaneously trying to speak and trying to silence herself. Trying to be honest while also trying to be acceptable. Looking at it now, I do not just see a teenager writing a poem. I see a teenager negotiating with herself over how much space she is allowed to take up on the page.

I want to be by myself, sometimes I do.
I don’t want to be left behind, but sometimes I’m left by you.
Reading those words now feels like looking at a girl who was trying so hard to understand why she felt so alone in rooms that weren’t empty. I contemplated this often in a lot of my writing at this age. It’s not just sadness, but confusion. Like loneliness wasn’t supposed to exist in the presence of other people, and yet, for me, it did. I didn’t know then that loneliness isn’t always about being by yourself. Sometimes it’s about being unseen. Sometimes it’s about speaking a language no one around you understands yet. There’s this push and pull woven through every line. Wanting to be alone, but not wanting to be left. Wanting connection, but bracing for the moment it disappears. I can see now how much of that was me trying to protect myself without even realizing it. If I said I wanted to be alone, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much when I actually was. Wanting to be alone because being alone feels safer, while also feeling devastated when solitude isn't my choice. If I edited myself first, maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much when someone else didn’t understand. If I expected distance, then maybe it wouldn’t feel like abandonment when it came. But it still did. It always did.

So what is this weather, and what is this darkness,
and why do I feel so alone?
When will it snow, it’s been raining for hours,
and why do I feel so alone?
I think this is one of those places where adult me has language that teenage me didn't yet have. The weather imagery stands out to me because it feels less like metaphor and more like description. Depression, anxiety, grief, hypervigilance... these things often feel like weather, even now as an adult. Something happening to you rather than something you choose. Something that arrives without warning, settles over everything, and changes the entire landscape around you. At fifteen, I didn't have the vocabulary for depression or anxiety. I certainly didn't understand concepts like hypervigilance or emotional dysregulation. I only knew that sometimes the world felt dark for reasons I couldn't explain, and that those feelings seemed to come and go according to rules I didn’t yet understand. I ask What is this weather? as though I'm standing outside looking up at a storm I cannot predict. The darkness is external. The loneliness is external. The rain is something happening to me rather than something coming from within me.  I think that is why the line still resonates with me. So much of my adult life has been spent trying to understand experiences that often feel less like emotions and more like weather systems. Depression rolls in. Anxiety settles over everything like fog. Grief arrives unexpectedly years later. Hypervigilance feels like standing outside during a thunderstorm, waiting for the next strike. And perhaps that’s why I ask when will it snow instead of when will it stop raining? Snow is still weather, but it is quieter. Softer. It covers things instead of beating against them. There is almost a longing for a different season entirely. Looking back now, I don’t think the teenage version of me was trying to describe sadness exactly. I think she was trying to describe what it feels like when your internal world behaves like the sky: unpredictable, uncontrollable, and completely capable of changing without your permission. Even at fifteen, I seemed to understand that whatever I was experiencing felt larger than an emotion. It felt atmospheric. Like I was living inside it rather than simply feeling it.

You pretend to defend me and lend me your heart
Saying “I know you’re no angel, but this is a start”.
The lines that may have changed the most for me over time are these. At fifteen, I think I intended them to sound romantic. Someone choosing me despite my flaws. Someone trying to understand me. Someone offering love as a beginning. But the more I look at them now in hindsight, the more complicated they become. At the time, these lines were almost certainly about the long-term relationship I was in. He was a football player. Popular. Preppy. He came from a loving, stable family and a world that made sense to people in ways mine never seemed to. I was the band geek. The alternative kid. The girl in black band shirts who listened to angry music, felt everything too deeply even then and wrote poetry about it in the margins of her notebooks. We cared about one another, but we truly came from different worlds. Looking back, I think pretend to defend me may have had a very literal meaning. I noticed fairly quickly that the way he introduced me often began with a disclaimer. There was usually a “but” attached to me. An explanation. A softening. But, she's actually really nice. Don't let the black clothes fool you. She's a little different, but... He wasn't trying to embarrass me. I don't believe he was being cruel. But even then, I think I felt the difference between someone standing beside you and someone translating you for other people. The word pretend stands out to me now because I didn’t write you defend me. I wrote you pretend to defend me. Even at fifteen, there seems to be an awareness that the protection being offered was somehow incomplete. Perhaps it was performative. Perhaps it came attached to the understanding that I needed defending in the first place.

The second line feels equally revealing: I know you're no angel, but this is a start. I was writing from his perspective. Perhaps these were words he actually said in some form. I honestly don't remember. At the time, you're not perfect, but I'll love you anyway sounded romantic. It felt like being chosen. Reading it now, I hear something much different. Because the line contains judgment before it offers compassion. It is not: I know you're hurting. I know you've been through things. I know you're struggling. Instead, it feels closer to, you're too emotional. You're too different. You're too dark. You're too much. You're not quite right. But you're changing those things, so this is a start. Looking back, I don’t think he saw me as someone who was hurting. I think he saw me as someone who was damaged, dark, and broken, and that intrigued him. And while he may have genuinely cared for me, there was very little curiosity about why I was the way I was. The answer was simply to love me anyway. And that sounds romantic in theory. But there is a profound loneliness in being loved as a problem to overlook rather than a person to understand. The message becomes: I know you're difficult, but I'll stay. Instead of: I know you're different. Help me understand you because I want to stay. Looking back, I think these lines reveal something I would spend many years trying to understand. I had already begun viewing myself as someone who needed to be excused, softened, improved, or overlooked in order to be loved. The love being offered often came attached to the understanding that I was "a lot." Perhaps that’s why the word pretend feels so important now. What I wanted was not someone to defend me, fix me, or make excuses for me. I wanted someone to understand me. To like the person standing in front of them rather than the person they hoped I might become one day.

And this is the part I’ve been meaning to share… (originally underlined)
If you can’t love me here, then you can’t love me there.
Looking back now, I read that line from my adult perspective as: If you cannot love me as I am, in this darkness, in this confusion, in this version of me, then you will not magically love me after I become better. It's a theme I've written about repeatedly as an adult. The idea that love contingent upon healing is not really love at all. Apparently, the teenage version of me was already wrestling with that. At the time, though, I think the line was much more directly aimed at that relationship. He was a good person. But we were complete opposites. On paper, we had very little in common. Yet somehow we worked because I made him laugh. I think I offered him space to express a side of himself that he was not always comfortable showing to other people. When we were alone, he was not quite the same person he was around everyone else. He could be sillier, softer, less composed. Looking back, I don’t think he wanted to be as polished or as carefully put together as he often appeared. But society has expectations, and so did his family. He knew who he was supposed to be. The problem was that I didn’t fit neatly into that picture. I didn’t look right beside him. I didn’t listen to the right music, wear the right clothes, or come from the right kind of home. I think he genuinely loved the parts of me that allowed him to loosen his tie a little, to laugh more, to be less guarded. But I’m not sure he always knew what to do with the rest of me. And perhaps that’s where so much of the tension lived. He wanted me to fit into his world, while I was quietly shrinking pieces of myself to make that possible.

He had a talent for what I now think of as compliment sandwiches… criticism wrapped in praise. You're beautiful, but… you'd look prettier if... You’re so funny, I just wish you weren't so... You're great, but you need to...  Nothing overtly cruel, nothing I would have recognized at fifteen. I didn't even realize it was happening until I looked up one day and discovered how much of myself I had quietly set aside. The burned CDs he made me felt poetic then, and I mistook adopting his soundtrack for sharing a life. Somewhere along the way, my own music became quieter. I swapped my black clothes for brighter ones. I softened the edges of who I was. I became smaller, easier, more acceptable to bring home to meet his family. He wasn't trying to be cruel, and I do believe he genuinely cared for me in the way teenagers care for one another. But caring for someone and liking who they actually are are not always the same thing. So if I had to guess what fifteen-year-old me meant when I wrote that line, it was probably less, Love me through my darkness, and more, If you cannot love me as I am now, you will not love me after I become the version you're trying to create. And perhaps that’s why the line still resonates with me all these years later. Long before I had the language for it, I already understood something that would take me decades to fully articulate: love should not require becoming someone else.

Calculate the interstate, and you do the best that you can
Simplify the distance and don’t change your plan.
Looking back, I think this is the section of the poem that adult me understands best because it describes a coping mechanism I still have. Up until this point, the poem is entirely emotional. Why do I feel alone? What is this darkness? Why am I being left behind? Why can't someone love me here? Immediately before these lines, I interrupt myself: Get to the point, kid. You're starting to ramble. And suddenly the language changes. These are no longer feeling words. They are engineering words. Map words. Problem-solving words. It almost reads like someone sitting down with an atlas after crying because they got lost for a bit. Looking back, I don’t think that transition is accidental. The emotional questions are deemed excessive, so the poem shifts into something more practical. More useful. More acceptable. Even at fifteen, I seemed to have understood that emotions made people uncomfortable, including myself. So after asking the same questions over and over, the poem essentially says: Enough. Get to the point. Solve the problem.

As an adult, I recognize exactly what’s happening. When emotions become too large, my brain leaves the emotional world entirely and enters the logistical one. I cannot solve loneliness, rejection, sadness, or uncertainty. But I can solve mileage, routes, plans, timing, and distance. I still do this. When relationships feel uncertain, I analyze conversations. When something confuses me, I research. When emotions become overwhelming, I write. When something hurts, I begin constructing contingency plans. I find alternate routes. When you grow up in environments where emotions are not particularly safe, practical solutions become safety. I learned very early that feelings rarely fixed problems, but plans sometimes did. I also find the word interstate interesting. Not road, not path… Interstate. Something large. Something that stretches between places. Something that separates two people from one another. Distance made physical.

Simplify the distance and don't change your plan almost reads like advice I was giving myself. Reduce it. Make it manageable. Break it into miles instead of emotions. Stay the course. It feels remarkably similar to the way I would later survive grief: just get through today. Just make the next appointment. Just survive this hour. Distance becomes something measurable instead of something felt. Looking back, I do not think fifteen-year-old me was trying to solve the problem at all. I think she was trying to survive it the only way she knew how: by turning overwhelming emotions into something that could be mapped, measured, and eventually traveled through. Because plans can be followed. And perhaps even then, some part of me believed that if I kept moving long enough, I would eventually arrive somewhere better. The girl who asks the questions and the girl who solves the problem are the same person, but the second one only appears after the first is told she's taking up too much space.

Your time is coming and mine’s coming, too.
The final line remains one of the most interesting to me. The red text comments and interrupts, almost as though another voice has entered the conversation. At fifteen, I suspect I intended it romantically. Two people waiting for their moment. Two teenagers believing that eventually things would work out. But reading it now, I hear something much larger. After an entire poem filled with loneliness, confusion, darkness, and distance, the final line suddenly offers something the rest of the poem never does: hope. Not our time. Your time and mine, too. Looking back, I think this may have been less about him than it was about me. A girl who already felt out of place, already felt too different, too emotional, too much, quietly believing that perhaps her life had not happened yet. Perhaps there was still a version of the future where she belonged somewhere. The line feels almost like a promise: Keep going. Your time is coming. And perhaps that is why it being written in red matters so much. It feels less like the voice of the hurting teenager and more like the voice of the person she would eventually become. I can’t help but think about the ways my life would eventually unfold. The grief I had not yet experienced. The losses I could not imagine. The years I would spend trying to understand myself. The writing that would become my refuge. And perhaps most surprisingly, the people I had not met yet. 

Growing up, I was often told that the kind of love I dreamed of did not exist. My mother used to tell me that it was a fairy tale. That real relationships require sacrifice. That people changed for one another. That this was simply what love looked like. And because I believed that, I tolerated far more than I should have for far longer than I should have. I thought love meant becoming easier. Quieter. Less emotional. Less weird over time. I thought everyone slowly sanded away the parts of themselves that did not fit their partner. Of course relationships require growth. We should change the things that hurt ourselves and the people we love. We learn. We compromise. We become better partners. But that is not the same thing as self-erasure. Looking back now, I can see that I was not simply growing. I was disappearing. I was setting aside music I loved, softening my opinions, changing my style, shrinking my feelings, and making myself smaller in hopes of becoming easier to love. I no longer hear it as a promise between two teenagers. I hear it as hope. Hope that perhaps the kind of love I wanted was not a fairy tale after all. Hope that one day someone would sit with the darkness instead of asking me to leave it. Hope that one day I would not have to become someone else in order to be chosen. All these years later, I have someone who has seen my mess. Someone who has spent countless hours over endless nights understanding the shadows instead of asking me to hide them. Someone who has listened to the fears, the grief, the anxiety, the stories, and the true words beneath the metaphors, and still stays.

There is something almost overwhelming about realizing that fifteen-year-old me wrote, Your time is coming and mine's coming, too, years before I would ever understand what it felt like to be truly seen. Years before someone would sit with the darkness instead of asking me to become someone else. Years before I would discover that being understood feels entirely different from being tolerated. I don’t think she knew exactly what she was waiting for. Only that she believed it existed somewhere out there. And perhaps that is what moves me most now. And maybe, even then, some part of her believed that if she kept moving long enough, her time would eventually come. Looking back now, I think she was right.

I guess I’m struck less by the poem itself than by how familiar the voice feels. The questions have changed very little. The metaphors have become more polished, the language more precise, but the themes remain the same. What does it mean to be understood? How much of myself am I allowed to keep? Must I become someone else to be loved? Why does loneliness sometimes feel like weather? How do you survive feelings you cannot explain? My writing often begins in emotion and ends in meaning. It starts with what hurts and ends with asking what do I do with this? Fifteen-year-old me may not have understood that this was a coping mechanism, but adult me recognizes it immediately: when I cannot solve the feeling, I solve the route. And perhaps the most surprising thing is that my younger self was not necessarily trying to escape the pain. She was trying to survive it by turning it into something measurable. Because plans can be followed. Roads eventually end. Looking at this poem now feels less like reading something I wrote and more like meeting someone I have known my entire life. The girl asking why she feels so alone, the girl editing out her own words, the girl trying to make herself smaller, easier, more understandable... she is not nearly as different from me as I once believed. Perhaps that is what has stayed with me most. Not that I have changed, but that I can finally understand what she was trying to say.

The weird girl scribbling poetry in the margins of her notebooks, sitting in all of that loneliness, somehow still believed that something better was coming. I think she was writing to me as much as she was writing to him.

Your time is coming, sweet girl. And mine is coming, too.