I stood in the kitchen, back pressed against the sink, facing away from the pile of dirty dishes. I knocked my feet together, watching the dust from my socks swirling in the air, only to settle again. I kept doing that—looking for something, a connection, a faith I hoped would bloom.
Suddenly, I thought of a friend I had when I was fifteen, mesmerized by the way muscles tensed and relaxed. I left those dirty dishes in the sink. I took thirteen paces back to my bedroom, opened my cherry red leather-bound journal, and on the fourteenth of February, I wrote a poem and sixteen reasons for it, while looking onto my seventeenth birthday.
The pages read:
Perfection misled us,
but we chose God to accept our flaws.
We have been angry like him too,
but his son was a man like us.
He still loved us fully and openly until his dying breath.
My one wish is to love you proudly.
One day, I will look you in the eyes and say:
You are the gift God brought me. I feel you without thinking, always,
because I feel God with you.
Like the rainbow after the storm, you stretched across my life, leading me toward light. You are my covenant,
whole and unbroken, written into His plan.
Writing those words was about holding onto a lifelong promise to love. In writing, I find my way back to my truest self–a way to make sense of what I can’t always express and a space to preserve what matters most.
My writing is an altar and a canvas, built on worship and devotion. My friend was my first poem. I crafted these pages into cathedrals, perfectly organized into gorgeous columns, pressing his smile into stained glass. I built him as a Michaelangelo, forever preserved in time, shut within the 115 wide-ruled pages of my journal. He lives as vividly in writing as he does in the world. Yet, I feel his resistance. I can hear him, wrestling among the pages, aching to climb out.
He whispers, “How dare you?”
“I’m sorry,” I think as I put my pen down.
I struggle. How do I explain that writing isn’t possessive? I just can’t contain him in an essay. It’s fleeting, and our essence survives more than what’s on the page. Every time I try to write it down, I just can’t get it all. I’m stuck.
This tension—the desire to hold on and the impossibility of complete preservation—is the bane of my existence. We fear being remembered only for our flaws, but as a writer, I believe my craft is devotion. Writing someone down is an honor. I capture a person as they are in a moment, as imperfectly unique as they are. Whether in an hour or a year, I freeze our connection in time, where words measure everything.
I write because I cannot speak. I can’t explain that to him. Honestly, by trying to honor him, I’m trapping him in my memory, as objective as I try to say my work is.
I write because it is the only way I can keep life in my grasp. If I blink, he’ll move.
I write to keep up with my world and how quickly it’s changing before my eyes. My pen is proof that I was here. I surrender to time: my pen is proof that I loved. I existed. I existed full of love, hope, and faith.
I write to give my love a home, even if it never had one in reality.
I write so when the love I dream of does exist, my wish won’t feel so out of reach anymore. I will love exactly as I said I would.
I write to document my emotional evolution, and how my perception of my people shifts over time. Even their absence becomes something dynamic–something that teaches me just as much as their presence once did. In my writing, they’re immortalized as lessons, not just people.
Even though they aren’t there in the same way, their presence still lingers in my growth and self-discovery.
I don’t write to hold onto anyone.
I write to hold on to what it felt like to know them.
I write because it taught me that love is never really wasted. Love shapes us, teaches us, and gives us new ways to see the world. When I write, I learn from everyone at my own pace. People leave marks on us that aren’t about romance or heartbreak, but transformation. As I move forward, I carry that impact in what I create. To me, that’s the most lasting kind of connection.
I write to know what growing up feels like. I’m a mosaic of everyone I’ve loved and had the privilege to love.
I write to navigate losing someone, something, and everything. My words are about carrying that loss with me in different ways, letting its influence shape my art. Anyone who hears me becomes more than an observer. They become participants in the emotions and lessons in my words.
I write to gain control over the uncontrollable. My emotions become tangible, something I can revisit when I’m ready. These words are my way out the labyrinth, instead of wandering through walls I can’t define. In my surrender to the labyrinth, to my spiritual mystery, I’m in charge of my own evolution.
I write because this is personal, but also universal. I know others can feel my truth. They can look at it and find it in their own lives.
I write because I know that the best writing is ephemeral. It captures fleeting moments, and intense emotions that come and go, and yet, in doing so, it becomes timeless.
I write so that someone reads my words and feels understood. When I transfer that power from my pen to the page, these aren’t just my thoughts anymore. My story becomes part of someone else’s understanding and experience.
I write to experience connection, not just expression.
Our shared humanity is why I write. I wish that a piece of me lives on in someone else, not just as something they read, but as something they felt. My words live beyond me. I become part of this long human story, hopefully, partly defined by my contribution.
In the end, as I grow into my cosmic self, transcending love, loss, and reality. I become ink and memory, frozen on paper—just as we all will be one day. And in that permanence, there is something undeniably poetic.
Rainey Reese is a Chicago teenager writing through growing pains. She was a 2024 Young Chicago Authors NextGen Intern and is recognized as one of the city’s upcoming youth writers. Her work has been published in Teen Ink Magazine, Blue Marble Review, and Write the World Review. Recently, she was awarded a 2025 Gold Key and American Voices Nomination in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.