In elementary school, boys would never “ask you out” face-to-face. If they wanted you to be their girlfriend, they would either have one of their friends come up and ask you out for them, or they would write a note in which you had to circle yes or no. It was all very innocent and enduring when I think back to that method now as a college girl, because the way I get asked out currently is through a DM on Twitter or a half-hearted text that informs me that the guy wants to “just chill and talk.” I yearn for the days when boys would write songs, love letters, and even entire novels dedicated to the women they wanted, but mostly I am not-that-secretly desperate for the practice of writing love poetry to become all the rage again.

I have had four poems written about me in my short life so basically, I’m on a roll. Those poems meant more to me at the time than I knew a page full of scribbled words ever could, but after the author of those poems was kicked out of the picture, the words just made me want to roll my eyes into the back of my skull. Poetry had lost its magic for me. After all, it was just a bunch of words that were probably never backed up by action which meant that the subject was still sitting at home wondering why she sucked so much. Shakespeare probably messed with a lot of fair maidens’ heads.

Then one night, I was sent a picture of a doodle that depicted a boy and girl walking through a field, in front of a fence, with a sentence floating above them: ‘We stood there laughing, wisped away.’ I never knew if it was inspired by me, or why the person would even send it to me, but I felt a calmness after reading those words, feeling their gravity, wondering what exactly was going on in their head. I remembered just how few words it took to make me realize that, just possibly, there was a person left on this earth that might be able to write for me- to write for the sake of preserving the life that begins when somebody is brave enough to put pen to paper.

The Poet and I swapped a few poems back and forth like we were characters in a John Green novel. An outsider would have gagged. However, to us the transfer of words and thoughts and emotions was the only way we were able to feel a little relief from the worry that we were alone in the world, with nobody to understand that we weren’t actually aiming to be pretentious. Writing poetry was just the way we were able to make sense of anything. It felt good to be heard without having to speak.

Sometimes it all got to be too much for The Poet, though, and he would shut himself off so that I was suddenly left wondering if my habit of over-feeling was once again making me look crazy. During these times, I would write so that I would not feel tempted to send out a cryptic sub-tweet. Emily Dickenson and e.e. cummings never lounged woefully on their velvet chaises, or pondered by a glowing fireplace about what they could tweet to indirectly apologize for their clingy emotions, so I tried my best not to either. After a while, things would go back to normal, but I would always feel a little more hesitant to lay everything down on the table with The Poet for fear that they might pack up their stuff and find another place to sit.

Genuine human connections are hard to come by, especially when you are as introspective and melodramatic as I am. The second I feel like I am being truly understood and accepted by someone, I latch on to them like my life depends on it. The Poet realized too late that he was now trapped in my “glass case of emotion,” and I’m sure that he curses the day that he sent me that doodle that probably had nothing to do with me. If one day I find myself alone again, surrounded by the debris of My Little World that was shattered by the reality that deep connections and the art of expressing them through rhyme is dead, I will roll on like a tumbleweed- collecting pieces as I go; throwing my seeds to the wind in the hopes that at least one of them will take root.