Rain Drops and Rose Petals

I remember I wrote a poem about rain when I was 12 years old. It was brief. It rhymed, and I was immensely proud of it. My seventh grade teach adored the poem. All I remember were the lines "rain, rain go away, come again another day . . ." and then something melodramatic like, "is this life or is this pain?" Pain, rain . . . what original rhyming! I felt like such a genius. I felt the path of my poetdom stretching endlessly before me. Keep in mind that this is also around the same time I discovered Chopin- the Raindrop prelude (which I later played in a recital) was featured on a best-of tape of "classical" piano music (Chopin is from the Romantic era, technically, but I digress). At the time my hormones were beginning to surge I discovered the beauty of melancholia, tapped out in rain drop after rain drop. From the age of seven I had been a fairly prolific diarist, but my personal accounts swelled to fill many journals. Later my grandfather gave me a typewriter, a tool I used well into my teens, despite the availability of computers- the clacking of the old typewrite held endless romantic appeal for me. Chopin, and his piercing emotional qualities, taught me the meaning of unrequited love. Listening to the waltz dedicated to the woman he was not allowed to marry due to his ill health, I felt a kindred spirit. I too suffered, I felt, from unfulfilled desires, but then again, I think most 12 or 13 year olds feel this way. But there is a beauty in such emotionality, despite its triteness, that I think holds value well into boring old crusty adulthood. As grown people we tend to grow out of our longing. We settle and we eak out our existence with fewer feelings or expectations. Feelings are the stuff of great art, when combined with skill and discipline. Call me an emotionist, but I live for the heady flush of excitement, whether it be cerebral or sensual. I attribute this to my addict self. My addict, or emotionist self gets misty eyed when listening to music, cries over the resolution of a romantic plot, and feels the loneliness, the despair of the tragic fates represented tirelessly in books, film, music . . .

So today it is raining. If anyone were to find this note, I would instruct them to try an inappropriate emotion on for size and write a bad poem about it and put it away in a drawer to be found and savored at some later date, preferably amid dried rose petals.