I had the same English teacher three years in a row. In tenth grade accelerated English, we read The Catcher in the Rye. We read it in chunks of a few chapters and then we would have corresponding quizzes and projects to do in class. I cried a lot reading that book. I was always reading books that meant nothing to me. Especially in eleventh grade English, when we read The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men. Those books meant nothing to me.
The times I cried reading The Catcher in the Rye weren't the times when something sad happened. It was at times when Holden, the main character, the narrator, sounded familiar. Times when I swore I could've written the same sentence that I had just read. I remember the way he described a girl at his school. He didn't really say anything about her hair, or her clothes, or her body. He just said that she had a big nose, and her nails were "all bitten down and bleedy-looking". I was sitting in a big cushy chair at an empty cafe in my town drinking my lukewarm free coffee refill when that line got to me and my eyes started watering. How could a boy notice some girl's bitten down fingernails before anything else?
Holden always said things in a way that was stumbly and hesitant. Sentences that were chunky and immature. He didn't care that you didn't care, he would tell you anyway. And that's kind of what I do. I'll tell you about the details you didn't ask for, but I won't mention too much of the big picture stuff. And I'll do it in an awkward way, a way that some people can't listen to.
I write about girls a lot. I like girls just as much as Holden Caulfield. Maybe even more. I sometimes think I do like girls more than him. I had that teacher for a third and final year, when I took Creative Writing my second semester of senior year. I learned a lot in that class. She read everything I wrote and one time I mentioned that I still feel like I write like Holden Caulfield. She said I have a little bit of Holden. She did see that. I was happy about that, that she noticed it.
YOU ARE READING
Everything left to complain about (stopped) (go read my other poem book)
PoetryPoems and strings of words that don't qualify as poems, from all four years of high school until the summer after freshman year of college. My recent works and anything I continue to write can be found in my new poem book, "Open your hands and say s...
