We didn’t have words like self care or journaling when she gave me the Nothing Book for my birthday. It was just as described, a hard covered book with blank pages inside. I carried it each day to my locker on the first floor of Central Junior High School. When she got off her bus, she would run to me and ask, straight from the words on the cover, “Did you make something of it?” It made us laugh every time, and every time the answer was yes. I’d show her my newest poem and we would revel in our insight. What time we were wasting, we thought, with social studies and geometry, when we understood at such depths, the poetry of this world. 

I still have this book. I still have this friend. And isn’t that, I suppose, the most beautiful poem of all. 

And it’s a question I still ask of myself daily, “Did you make something of it?” Referring to the day, the time given, the loves around me. And it’s not pressure, but more acccountability, as I see her opening the large middle doors of the junior high. I smell the bus fumes and cling my “something” to my eager chest. Ready to offer to her, to this world, what I have made. Knowing, that if I’m not giggling with the depths of yes, then I have to do more. Be more. She’s getting closer now, and I open to today’s page, smiling. Yes!