Gems of Ages Past

I'm in the midst of a perpetual house-cleaning and picked up some miscellaneous boxes from a former household. In those boxes were the few papers and things I had left kicking around from high school. There's a book on mythology, an annotated periodic table, and my hand-written notes explaining HTML from an era before the blink tag had been deprecated.

Yes. Those were the halcyon days, when all the cool kids had red blinking text scrolling across the top of their Angelfire homepage, followed by low-resolution graphics separated by horizontal rules. And the color of the text (in various sizes) always seemed to clash with the background made of tiled Hubble shots of the Crab Nebula.

Also in the pile, along with more academic detritus, were some obscure poems from 1996 and 1997. I'll admit it. I was emo. It's impossible to laugh at yourself when you're 16. After all, you are confronting all of the fundamental problems of human society! But all the same, it's interesting to examine the teenage phase.

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"November is the place that I keep between my heart and ice."

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"Black ink alone on a stark naked page,
gives itself purpose with words.
Words tossed around, neglected with age,
give their immortality to thoughts."

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"Lying in the cornfield,
her somber black hair streams in the night wind
She thought a single thought which echoed in the expanse,
'Justify my existence.'
[...]
The echo slipped around as if the night were tasting before making its judgments,
then there came only the whispering of silence building.

The clouds drifted in their sphere and were contented, high above,
obscuring and revealing the night as was their will.
The stars twinkled in their sphere and did not notice the clouds.

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Thus you have it; teenage existential angst and profound alienation in pristine condition - suitable for framing. Or maybe one could tuck it into that custom black pleather Precious Moments scrapbook with the Celtic knots and Neil Gaiman graphics painted on in nail polish.