Category : Stories

Sub Category : N/A

 The heavy, beat-up cube-of-a-hardcover-book with countless familiar names of kids in years above me at school; some written in pen, others in pencil, most never return-dated. 
We pulled those out. Turned to page something-or-other. It was English 101. Junior high. Seventh grade. Mr. Costello's class. "We're still doing poetry this week, today's focus will be on a poem called Annabel Lee." 
Reluctant robots, but robots indeed, the 22 of us flipped to the page with that Annabel's name at the top. 
The teacher read, I fell in love. 
Annabel, how I wish she had lived to love whomever wrote so perfectly and so devastatingly beautiful about her life and her death. 
Her sepulcher, that pretty, sadistic word. What did it mean? And why was hers under the sea? And their love—envied by the Angels above? What a thought…what a love to be thought…ah, or perhaps, what love to have really existed? 
Edgar Allan Poe, the first person I found myself belonging to in the way fresh water occasionally meets with salt water but still always stay divided. 
I was thirteen and my old soul found solace in this heavy textbook turned spell book. 
A soul buried under ages of poetic dirt and wonder about the sunlight behind the naked winter trees blocking the view, accepted the view as no better than any other because alone I was not—always in another universe, I existed. As did Annabel. As did those Angels. As did the narrator. As did Edgar—the immortal soul and key to my very own.