Casper Cunneen reflects on rereading and rewriting high school poems, and takes readers on a journey through their teenage years.
I’m a slow typer. I remember doing touch typing classes on my little MacBook air I
had at home when I was 10, and I was about half the speed as my classmates.
Even during high school, when trying to type notes of what the teachers were saying -
I could never type fast enough, or without error.
So, throughout my teenage years, I was one of the only students in class who still
wrote all their notes in the actual journals. Lined pages and all. For every subject,
every zoom call, every period. Even when I read from articles and textbooks digitally,
I still wrote all my notes in my notebook. I usually kept one notebook during all of my
classes to write in and most of the time, I wasn’t really doing classwork: I was writing
poetry.
Over about a 4-year period, I wrote upwards of about 200 poems, either in one of my
notebooks or on pieces of paper I ripped off worksheets, notepads and marked tests.
I had a small book cart at home where I kept all of my journals, a mixture of both
half-finished and fully finished notebooks.
Then when I moved out of home about a year ago, I had to go through my stuff to
figure out what to throw out from high school. I threw out almost everything, but I
couldn’t touch my notebooks. I put them all in a box and told myself, “One day, I will
digitise all of my work and maybe I can finally get any of my good pieces published.”
Well, about three weeks ago, I got extremely sick and had to take a week off work to
recover. My partner who I live with, was working away for the week so I had the
apartment to myself. And a lot of spare time. So, I got opened a new folder on my
computer labelled “Journal 1”, picked up the notebook at the top of my pile, and
started recording.
My god it was fascinating.
When I first wrote poems, it was extremely structured. Like something out of a
nursery rhyme. I wrote about flowers on a walk that I saw, I wrote about a song I
found on Spotify, I even had about 4 poems written back-to-back on a 6-hour train
ride. As I was typing down the poems (and correcting my horrible spelling), I felt like I
was taken back to that moment of when and where I wrote it. I don’t remember the
exact conversations, but I can remember what I was thinking, who I was thinking
about, and what it meant to me.
As I read on, my poems started to turn into inspirational quotes, but with poetic
structure. It was the moment after I started to get into Rupi Kaur’s works on
Instagram. I wrote mostly through nature metaphors, or describing a rainy day or an
open ocean. One of my journals I wrote a lot about this guy named Dylan, who I don’t remember, yet I seemed to be really hung over this guy. I think two of the
poems in that journal were about him, and honestly it's quite funny to remember the
feelings of crushes and young love.
Eventually, I found some real gems. Things that I didn’t need to edit or rephrase.
That were genuinely beautiful pieces of art, truly expressing very deep and complex
feelings of later teenhood. One of my favourites was in regard to someone who had
passed away during the last year of high school, someone who at the time, I was just
passing the threshold of “someone I knew” to a potential friend, through some shared
interests. I compared it as if reading a book in an expansive library, anticipating the
next chapter and the turning over to blank pages. It wasn’t my longest poem, but it
captured that in-between feeling of losing someone you almost knew. Someone you
were getting to know. Someone, who in another life, you would see as a friend.
There's something special about having my teenage years captured in my journals.
When I talk to new friends about our youth, most people have photos to share or
videos to play. Albums on their parents Facebook or 15th birthday posts that your
relative reshare. Old Instagram archives of who you once were and notifications of
memories from years past. They captured the external of the memory, and what it looked
like to the world.
But I feel like I have a very intimate connection to my past self, as my memories are
kept in between lined pages on notebooks stashed on their own shelf in my bedroom.
It’s like having the key to your brain in the past, and notes on how the world was
seen through my younger eyes. I don’t just see what I looked like; I can feel how my
body held itself through those years and when I went through hardship, how I
processed what was going on and my place amongst it.
I still do write. Not at the speed that I used to when I was a teenager, but that’s due
to having my own life now. I have a casual job, rent to pay, friends to see and life to
live, instead of writing my way through the world.
I wrote a script recently, a short film funnily enough, set in a high school like my own.
And the one thing I wanted my main character to have, was a journal in their hand
where they wrote everything. Not a laptop or a tablet, a notebook. It felt right.
Because to me, in this digital world, there’s nothing more beautiful than those who
create art through the written word.
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