"And all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity..."
--Homeward Bound, Paul Simon

April is National Poetry Month, and that makes me think about Julia. The parts I remember best about going out with her are us sitting together, in the tree seat outside the house upstate, or on the couch in her apartment listening to Paul Simon or Queen, the Cruel Intentions soundtrack on the beanbag chair in her room. But that has nothing to do with poetry.

Julia is the only one of my friends to have ever written a poem that awed me. No, not quite awed - frightened. That poem frightened me. I can't remember the name of the thing at the moment. I'm not sure that it matters. The first time I read it, Tara had stopped me in the stairwell, an odd look on her face. She showed me the poem and my jaw dropped at how good it was. Before we went our separate ways to class, we shared a quick conversation about that, about how it scared us both. It seemed that out of the six of us, Julia was the only one with real talent. It was really at that point that I gave up on poetry as anything other than a hobby.

Sometimes I wonder when exactly she's going to publish her first book of poems. Less frequently, I wonder if she even plans on it. And I also wonder, if I gave her a copy to sign, what she would write inside the front cover.

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