(C) Simon Garcia
There is someone out there who wrote a poem in the early 1990s that was published by Seventeen.
I don’t know the author. I don’t know the title. I don’t know the editor that found the poem and loved the poem and published the poem.
I DO know it was about girls and stones and glass houses. Torches maybe. And I do know that that poem stuck with me forever, changed my whole life, shaped who I am.
I wasn’t a girl in a glass house, on fire with broken edges. But my friend was. And here was a stranger who put to words why she was so dangerous and I was so afraid of her and she was so afraid of herself.
Someone had the words.
I wish I could find the author and tell her (I’m sure it was a “her”) that she showed me the way to being an author. She showed me how to the tell the truth, even when it didn’t feel easy, and even when it shattered and burned and cut the people we loved. The words did all that. The house didn’t survive the poem. But the poem survived the 90s and the aughts and the teens and now the twenties.
An eighth of page in a magazine for teenage girls keeps shaping the art in my mind decades later.
Actually. I don’t want to find the author. If you find her, don’t tell her.
Just know that any thing you create and throw out into the universe has ripples. Cracks? Shatters.
What you put into the universe will shatter someone’s universe for the better.