Pen in a Bottle

Updated December 30, 2004

Sitting outside the school counsellor's office, Nancy sat twisting a loose thread she had ripped free from her sagging hem.  The thread had caught on her sandal buckle as she stepped off the school bus that morning and was snagging at every step.  It was the least of her annoyances that day.  She was waiting for her parents to come out of a meeting with the school counselor and the principal.  She had been pulled out of class and tagged as a potential suicide victim, and they were all discussing her future at the school.

Nancy was a poet.  This was a new school and they hardly knew her.  She had to admit that she acted strangely at times, prefering to be on her own rather than hang out with the other students.  That was because ideas struck at the most inopportune times and she was often caught scribbling on what ever scrap of paper she could find, trapping whatever idea had caught her, and trance-like, she would hardly be aware of her surroundings.  She did not have any friends because she was shy.  The single-most difficult part about settling in for her was finding a poetry buddy.  She had not found one yet, and just to start coming out as a poet she decided to show her winning poem Here I Walk Alone to her English teacher who was so impressed she had passed it around the teachers lounge.

The poem was about the last person on earth after a devistating holocaust.  She is walking along a path amongst the debris of a destroyed world.  As she walks along she picks out treasures from the debris, still in tact that the owners would have held dear.  Now they are lying to waste in the rubble.   She questions, what meanings these things have now.   At first she wants to save everything--a jeweal box, a photo in a frame, a diary....  Then she decides to put them back as they were like grave stones marking the life that once was and is no more.  She questions what uses these things have now, what relevance.  She resolves that it is not the things that make a life, but the people in it, and further remarked it was over these things they owned and treasured that people fought to protect and now the the people are all gone and all that is left are their things.  Had they only known how futile the fighting was, they would still be here.  She leaves the things intact like tacit reminders of how we focuss too much on earthly treasures but when we die we cannot take them with us, but they remain as our only mark that once we were here. 

The poem had won Nancy first prize in the prose and poetry contest staged in her previous school in Brisbane Australia.  The English teacher, Mr. Simmons, liked to bring relavence to the classroom from the world we live in to make the study of English Literature come alive.  At the time, in the USA there had been a huge fervour created from a Television series about a nuclear bomb that went off in a small town in the USA called "The Day After."  The 1983 docudrama played on the air for the first time the same way the Orson Wells' radio broadcast, "War of the Worlds" in 1938 did with the same effect.  It was about a nuclear bomb going off in a small city in Kansas and it was shot like a news bulletin interrupting regular TV, like Wells had done on radio in 1938, and viewers thought they were being attacked.  It brought the reality of a nuclear holocaust home to many people around the world.   Mr Simmons jumped right onto the topic and introduced science fiction with a doomsday theme.  He mounted a school contest and put up the contending essays and poems up on a bulletin board in the rear of his classroom and placed a balot box for votes nearby.  The topic was rich and many students outpoured their fears and feelings in poems and stories and critical essays, and they voted for each other's work.

This was how she met her poetry buddy.  Ben O'toole who had hardly noticed Nancy before, perused the essay boards and found her poem.  Ben read her poem and she read his story.

"This one is yours?"  He asked.  Nancy nodded shyly.

"Do you have anything else?" Ben inquired.

"Well, yes."  Nancy responded, opening a scrap book stuffed with poems.  Ben reached into his satchel and pulled out a fat folder of prose.  They formed a literary club.  The Poetry and Prose Association.  Members: 2.

A tear cam to her eyes while she sat there reflecting back to the way it was. She missed Ben O'Toole.  He was her trusted and dear poetry buddy.  She could share anything with him an count on honest critique.  He wrote prose, and she wrote poetry and they mutually shared their work.  It was a platonic friendship, but deep.  It may have developed into something sexual at one point but they always stayed away from that.  Their union was on an intellectual sphere.  She missed that link so badly.  She just wanted to find another one, someone else she could share her work with, and discuss it.

The dooms-day theme was fertile, and Nancy and Ben both wrote much investigating the theme.  In the literature contest, Ben had won first prize for his short story, and Nancy had won first prize for her poem, Here I walk Alone.  Ben had loved it, and it circulated around the school as a great poem, and Nancy became renown as a passionate poet.

The poem, while dark, was fine in the dooms-day context, but in the new context, the Jakarta International School, it was met with concern. 

A few months ago there had been three suicides in the school, one troubled teen and two copy cats.  The school was highly sensitized.  The counsellor had read the poem and was surprised by the powerful emotions and the darkness of the topic and had completely misinterpreted it.

According to what he knew of the new student, Nancy Biddle, she was a quiet, mostly introverted girl with dark moods.  Though friendly, receptive, hard working, she often sat alone, writing or musing.   He saw her as a tender thing, certainly not capable of expressing the powerful emotions so succinctly captured on paper.  Bells went off for him and he and the school principal met to put in place the prevention program they had crafted to identify students with potentially negative behaviours and to intervene before they tried to kill themselves.  They called her parents in to say that they suspected she could be suicidal and needed their permission for the school psychologist to meet with her.

What idiocy, Nancy thought with a humph. Suicidal indeed!
 
The thread cut grooves in her writing finger.  She had twiddled it mindlessly around her fingers, the writer's bump protruded.  She looked at her fingers and she started to formulate and ode to the fingers that hold her pen out of which words flow onto paper.... and then just shut the poem out of her mind.  She was not going to grab for her pen this time.

She thought about her poetry.  It was avante guarde, Ben would say.   It doesn't rhyme.  It is free and flows and the words weave a message.  She loved words.  She loved experimenting.  She used writing to organize her thoughts, and make sense of things that seemed odd or upsetting, it was cathartic, but it was also a tool.  She did it as a hobby, and was just maturing into a full-time writer, thinking seriously about making it a career.  The talent was bourgeoning tenuously and needed to be focussed, and she was getting that focus from dear Ben, and with that resource now lost, she was flailing desperately. 

Tears surfaced with the frustration.  She sat watching the door for her parents to come out.  She untwiddled the thread and threw it on the floor, straightened her skirt, and sighed heavily.
 
Finally the door opened and out they came.  Dad came to hug her and whispered in her ear "They want you to see the school psychologist.  What a riot.  They just don't understand your poetry."  Mom took her turn. "You know we love you and that we are proud of you.  Maybe it is a good idea to see him.  It can't do any harm."  Can't do any harm indeed!  Don't understand!  What an understatement!  She thought.
 
In the psychologist office,  Mr Gray peppered her with questions and guided her through the conversation.  "What I was  was trying to do was to find a poetry support system," she explained professionally.  "Oh, family life was fine but I've always been different with my writing.  My parents are fine with my poetry but they really do not know how to critique it."  She continued, "and the reason I don't make many friends is that I only ever make one good friend where ever I am, it takes a lot to understand a writer, sometimes I'm just too serious!" She laughed.  "And anyway, writing is mostly a solitary activity..."  When questioned about her dark poetry she explained and the reason she wrote such dark poetry was to bring light to emotions deep inside and that if what she can express helps readers to locate their own feelings and make sense of them then her poetry succeeded, but it was not all dark.  "About the poem Mrs Dally shared in the teacher's lounge:   That poem was written inside a unit on science fiction focussing on the end of the world." She explained, and as far as she was concerned, suicide was as far as she could imagine, "..it was back when I was nine that once I had considered it, but when I wrote my feelings down it became a poem." she confided.   "I found that writing helped and that is how it all started.  I may be shy and delicate but I am not suicidal!"  She protested.  Mr Gray sat back satisfied.   He did not need to schedule another appointment.  He suggested she try to write lighter poetry, and to try rhyming perhaps.  He opened the door, "Any time you want to come and talk, just drop by."  and he patted her on the back and sent her on her way.

Dazed, and drained from the energy spent defending herself, she wandered into the hall back into the flow of students criss-crossing on their way to next period.
 
She just about made it to the Humanities class before the bell rang, and settled into her seat.  She looked uncomfortably around the classroom and felt the teacher's eyes pierce her.  His voice dribbled into the background and she tore a sheet from her notebook and tried to compose a light rhyming poem about suicide.

Catching pieces of the lecture, part of a unit on conservation and how humans affect the environment, the teacher spoke about reintroducing captive animals back out into nature and how it had to be done gradually and that the care takers had to withdraw from the animals so the animals would loose the human smell so the other wild animals would not ignore it, or worse, kill it, and that it needed to be encouraged to develop its skills for hunting and surviving with the least intervention.   He showed a video of monkeys whose mother had died and had been taken into a zoo to be raised being rereleased into the wild. 

He gave a few examples that the class could identify with, such as taking home a fish from the store aquarium:  "You can't just toss the fish into his new home he would die from the shock.  You have to put the bag with the fish, and the water he calls home, into the new tank and let the temperatures adjust, and then slit the bag and let the water mingle and blend making sure the slit is  big enough for the fish to swim out on its own."

Someone raised their hand and mentioned something about how it was like us moving to a new school, "but for us we're just thrown into the water and we survive or we don't".  Everyone laughed.  It was too true.