As I tallied up the ever-growing list of recipients, I picked the first few friends who had liked the status and began to write.

I opened up google drive,

Created a new document,

And titled the first page with the recipient's name.

This document would later end up to be fifty pages long.

I discovered I had a knack for writing at that moment.

I had no trouble writing three or four poems a day.

In fact, I had a lot of fun. More joy than I ever experienced while learning to code or solve math equations.

While I wrote, I began to rediscover what made each friend so special to me.

For one of my best friends who is now at Cal

It wasn’t that I was forcing myself to “discover” the hidden traits of the individuals. But rather, in order to personalize these pieces, I had to reanalyze my relationship with them and figure out why we became acquaintances in the first place.

For a saxophone section leader

Whether it was fooling around with our instruments in band, biking around the lake during the summer, or just staying up and talking about our lives, I saw how lucky I was to have friends like these.

For an artist

In the end, I received a series of second “first impressions.”

Forgotten memories were stirred back up and nostalgia overflowed my brain.

I realized then and there, after my sixtieth couplet, that I longed for connection with others. That without people in my life, I wouldn’t be able to survive.

And as I posted these poems on each of their respective walls, mutual friends would see them and comment about the things they noticed about one another as well. I had brought together my friend group through writing.

The values, aspirations, characteristics in each and every individual I had chosen to invest my time in over the prior years came rushing back. And scrolling through the poetry splayed out before me,

I saw a beautiful mosaic of friendship scattered throughout the eight hundred and forty lines.

For a very smart student

And after, I was no longer as lost as I had been.

I had found what I loved.

Human Connection.

Because In recognizing what made everyone else so special, I discovered what made me special as well:

Utilizing poetry to reignite relationships.

For an incoming high school senior

So here I am, writing away the worries of my life. I hope to go into a field within business that would allow me to interact with others on a daily basis.

Turns out, a STEM job in the lab, on the computer, or in the cubicle was just not meant for me.