I was fourteen, cross-legged on the bed,
a paperback widening the space between my hands
as evening slid across the walls,
that uncertain hour when ordinary things
Outside, Elmira murmured its small-town chorus:
porch lights warming awake,
a screen door slamming somewhere down the block,
a dog calling into the rising night.
But the world inside the page was louder, brighter, stranger.
West Egg glittered,
a city of champagne and secrets,
and I followed Gatsby into rooms
flooded with music and confetti laughter,
rooms where everyone smiled too broadly,
as if joy were a costume
and sorrow the body beneath.
Daisy drifted through those parties
like perfume in a doorway -
beautiful, fleeting, always about to vanish,
while Gatsby, stitched together from hope and reinvention,
stood watching her as if she were the single truth
in a world of mirrors.
I read as the parties curdled -
as bright lights grew brittle,
as love sagged beneath its own impossible dream.
Even I, too young for ruin,
felt the ache of that long reach
toward a past that refused to return.
The green light winked across imagined water,
as much a question as a beacon,
and somehow it flickered in me too -
a beckoning toward something unnameable
and just out of reach.
Still I read,
not yet understanding the bitterness in the beauty,
the way desire can turn on its dreamer,
but sensing - like a pulse beneath the page -
that these lives mattered,
even when they broke.
Later I would learn the sharp edges:
the violence beneath the silk,
the weight class and money can wield,
the devastation of a heart that believes
too fiercely in what the world won’t give.
But that night was the spark,
a door easing open,
a quiet breath of possibility -
and me, a kid on Lincoln Street,
in a room no larger than a single thought,
holding the first book
that taught me stories could bruise and glimmer at once,
that dreamers sometimes drown,
and that words, when they want to,
can change the size of the sky.
GBS jr
1999
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