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When I went to my first real poetry reading, my mom and I sat in the back row. It was in the small upstairs room of a tiny store in Hamden, and we were sitting on folding chairs. Our jackets were too heavy to be sitting on the chairs alone. They tipped weakly when we stood up.

The first people who read their pieces were decent, and I felt uneasy. Uneasy in the way that I felt both better than everyone around me, but also unsure that I was justified to feel that way.

I have gotten these butterfly feelings before, but it’s only sometimes, in moments of unbelievable clarity, that I can identify the exact reason for them. I think the most important times when I get these feelings are when I feel that someone truly, and irrevocable just gets it. You meet someone, you know, and just get the intrinsic understanding that they get it.

James Arthur was that way. He read his poem, the Land of Nod, and I felt with every muscle in my body, with shivers running down my spine and through my arms, that he just understood. he knew what I was feeling, and he told us all about it.

I don’t know how to write here. But lately I’ve been getting these intense feelings, and they make me feel like I want to cry, but I’m not sure about what. But these feelings, they’re just so overwhelming, so intense to think about.

There isn’t one person on this earth who understands everything in exactly the way I do. There isn’t someone who can talk to me about my dad, and about my writing, and about my feelings. But there’s just a couple people, and they give me these moments of clarity. They give me these moments of feeling like I am right. Like there is a way to live this life in exactly the way I’ve always imagined. There are people on this earth who get a high from words, from melodies, from feelings. There are other people, living on this earth right now, who feel true tears, and true joy, from some of the same things I do.

There’s been a lot that’s happened lately that I haven’t really been ready to start trying to write about. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to try, I don’t know. But God, I’ve missed this feeling. It is so exhausting sometimes to be talking to someone and to feel as if youre talking to yourself.

But to hear a piece of music and to feel it physically, to imagine another person just understanding that, I mean it honestly makes me feel unbelievable.

a lot of people want to get to know me

but so many people just don’t know how.

or they get caught up on things that are fun and cool to talk about but just don’t scratch the surface

sometimes I forget too that there is more beneath this surface

but these feelings, god, these feelings sometimes that

remind me of what it felt like when the world fell together for the first time

I have these moments of clarity where I feel like

I know why I’m here

I know what I want to do

I know what it’s like to just feel

they are so unpredictable

but so powerful.

and so hard to explain