There were three chairs lined up against the wall in the school chaplain’s office. He’d taken me out of a lesson to talk about something.
“Take a seat,” he said.
I chose the middle one.
“It’s funny — everyone always picks that one.”
Then he said: “So, tell me about these poems you’ve been writing.”
Shit. Someone had told.
I was 15 and struggling with a break-up with my first love. For reasons unclear to everyone except the wounded boy at the keyboard, I had started publishing poems about the ordeal on MySpace, where anyone from my state school in Bolton could read them.
The chaplain asked me to explain the meaning of a poem I’d titled “Car Crash Romance”. My finest work to this day. It was about heartbreak, betrayal and death. I don’t know how he managed to keep a straight face as I explained that the catastrophic car crash was a metaphor for the whole thing.
If stanza is Italian for room, please get me out of this one.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my face burning. “I’ll delete them all.”
“Well, you don’t have to do that,” he said. “I’m concerned about you more than anything else. I just want you to know I’m here if you want to talk. My door is always open.”
I deleted the poems when I got home, determined to avoid the limelight of the middle seat for the rest of my school career. Then I closed my laptop, got into bed and stared at the ceiling.
I was embarrassed. Ashamed. I decided I would never write about this kind of shit again.