Katie

My friend Katie has a blog, you should read it.

Katie used to eat alone wearing a Le Tigre shirt in the cafeteria. I wanted to be her friend so badly. I saw her and imagined what it would be like to be friends with a girl like that. Sometimes I would see her eating with a few other people. But, never in a large group. I almost always ate alone, reading a book.

I can't remember how we started to talk. It might have been I saw her profile on Make Out Club. I wish it was a better story than that. Maybe because my memory is so shaky, I could make one up. I think Katie would like that.

Katie was the one who told me to read Sylvia Plath. She would read over my poems and I would read over her poems. Her poems were beautiful and covered with a simple imagery. She never force fed you a line, each one came as easy and soundless, breathless, as the next. We both really liked the Robert Hass (He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

Sometimes we would sit in the PS section of Waldo library and look at books. I switched my major from English-Teaching to Creative Writing. I knew I wanted to do nothing else, and Katie encouraged me. She has always been a poet that I knew I liked. I knew made sense to me. I looked up to her a lot then, and I still do now, especially as she starts applying to the twenty-something different graduate schools. She seems stronger now. We both do. There was one summer I went a little crazy, and we both ended up dating the same boy, only I dated him after she did, and she didn't even get too angry with me. I sort of can't believe it.