I used to be somebody…
No, that’s not some cheesy, cliche line I pulled out of my *** for the sake of this poem.
Simply put, it’s the story of my English teacher asking me to read for the part of a character named “somebody” in To **** a Mockingbird, and later taking my script and giving it to someone else.
You can imagine how betrayed I felt.
I told her, “I’m gonna write a poem about this, and you’ll regret it!”
She didn’t hear me of course, but here we are nonetheless.
Fact is, I cared about somebody.
This is amusing to me because Harper Lee used “somebody” as a placeholder pronoun for a faceless, meaningless character who says one line on page 245, yet it meant so much to me.
I thought about how we humans often say, “I want to be somebody,” as if making your name known equals making your life meaningful.
The irony in this is that we’ll look at a stranger, someone nameless and meaningless to us as just somebody.
There’s a lesson to be learned from all this: everything is temporary.
Like a leaf that blooms in the springtime just to float to the ground when autumn comes,
or a ***** drawn on a bathroom stall just to be covered by a fresh layer of paint for the next prepubescent boy to leave his mark.
Even people are temporary.
We all have different needs, and tend to follow who or what those needs are.
Some spend their lives searching for a place where they feel needed.
Evidence of this can be seen in those instances where one person doesn’t need the other anymore, and the other is left to wonder what they did wrong.
This, my friends, is why when you ask someone about love, they’ll tell you about heartbreak.
Because hundreds of people may sit on a park bench on any given day, but none of them will notice the fading initials carved inside a heart on its side.
None of them will feel the meaning it once had.
They won't wonder if it ever held meaning at all.
Maybe both lovers cared about each other more than life, and they held hands while one of them carved their mark and smiled wide at the immortality of their love.
Maybe only one of them cared, and to the other, this gesture of a knife to old wood felt like nothing but pointless vandalism.
Maybe, just maybe, it held no meaning to either of them, and they hoped that a public display of their relationship would somehow save it from falling apart.
And where are they now?
Are they still head over heels for each other, naked in bed, pretzeled together while crisp Spring air filters in on a quiet Sunday morning?
Or do they each occasionally visit that park bench alone, running a finger over the indentation in the wood and remembering the Great Used To Be?
You may think all of this is a very cynical way of thinking, and you’d be correct.
But, I think I write because I’m answering the questions no one bothers to ask.
Whether my answers hold meaning to anyone,
or my writing somehow makes me “somebody,”
that’s not up to me.
Besides, it’s all temporary.