I never thought I'd actually miss any part of high school.

But I'm missing my creative writing class. Last year, I was the Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Spectrum. Not only did the class force me to write daily, but it exposed me to my peers whose writing would inspire and push me to work on mine.

Every now and then, I find myself in these ruts. I've got a million thoughts and the urge to put something on paper (or in most cases, on the screen), but when I get to the point of sitting down to work it all out, nothing sounds right. I've spend years trying to stop myself from my bad habit of editing while writing an initial draft. Even if it's just a short little poem, I cannot let it go.

A few months before I graduated high school, I was in one of these moods. Instead of staring at a blank screen for hours, I decided to rummage though the old desk in the basement. It had been my dad's before he invested in a new one. The metal handles didn't always stay screwed in and the middle draw stuck all the time. I pulled each draw out and slowly, deliberately went through old papers and bills. Newspaper clippings and photos.

I found a folder stuffed with a few tattered notebooks and tons of loose pages, some scraps of paper, some notebook pages, some written in pencil, blue ink, black ink, some written on a typewriter.

They were my mother's. Her poetry.

We are more alike than I could ever understand.