on the top shelf of my closet

all four years of high school live in a jose cuervo tequila box. i don't drink, and even when i did, i didn't drink tequila. before i typed out my poetry, i used to write it in the margins of my schoolwork. i have graduated and the box has moved states, and i still have not gone through the contents of it. not because i worry so much about my essays being cringe-worthy or seeing B minuses on the tops of the tests, but because i struggle to read my own handwriting - you know how some kids wrote in secret codes so that their parents couldn't read their notes? not me. i worry that my my words - whatever i thought was important enough to put in the jose cuervo tequila box - will disappear forever if i can't decode them. they say that your writing lives on long after you die, but what if no one can read it? not even the writer. when the words die, i die. 15 year-old me finally dies (the way she wanted to at the time). i spent a lot of time in college mourning lost words that were never mine to lose. it's been thousands of years and we still can't read Linear A, we have only fragments of Sappho, we don't know the way Catullus' manuscript was originally ordered because it was lost for centuries - we don't even have what we found anymore, just copies. i type what words i can remember, what things i think i wanted to say. Just copies.