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“A Story Yet to Be Named, but Never Forgotten”
Before smartphones and Spotify, there was a girl with a pen, a Walkman, and a heart full of verses. This is her story — not told in paragraphs, but in poetry. Not recorded on reels, but scribbled in notebooks during the final breaths of the 20th century.
In the hush between the dial-up’s cry,
And the Y2K rumors rustling by,
There lived a girl in denim blue,
In a world that barely knew what it knew.
She walked through malls like sacred halls,
With cassette tapes clutched and posters on walls.
Her Walkman sang of a love long gone,
In the age before streaming, before the dawn.
She wrote in notebooks, ink-stained and worn,
Spoke in lyrics she'd half-adorn.
Every poem a spark, a teenage scream,
Caught between paper and a pixelated dream.
The summer of ‘99 burned soft and bright,
Where Britney’s voice met satellite,
And under suburban cul-de-sac skies,
She dreamt of Europe with smoky eyes.
Her parents divorced on a Thursday night,
CNN whispering Kosovo’s fight.
She didn’t know the shape of war,
Only that it felt like a slammed bedroom door.
In homeroom, she passed poems down,
Folded like secrets, stitched with frowns.
One to James, who never replied—
But kept the note, though he lied.
She watched the stars from a trampoline,
Wondered what cyber really did mean.
Would the world stop at midnight’s chime?
Would her poems vanish, lost in time?
Libraries smelled of ink and wood,
And silence still felt understood.
She scribbled verses in the margins wide,
Next to drawings she never showed with pride.
“I’m not a girl,” she wrote one night,
“Nor a song that fades in morning light.
I’m thunder beneath the 90s gloss,
A poet carved in Windows DOS.”
She mailed a letter, stamp askew,
To a zine in Portland she barely knew.
They published her poem in issue nine—
Called it “Wired Love” in a font divine.
And when she saw her name in print,
She cried where no one saw the glint.
Not because fame had touched her room,
But proof her words could break the gloom.
The boy next door played Green Day loud,
Her window shook, her heart unbowed.
She wrote of him in stanza and line,
How he wore heartbreak like Calvin Klein.
But when December frost crept near,
And the world braced itself in fear,
She wrote a poem called ‘If I Wake,’
And sealed it in a snowflake’s ache.
At midnight, clocks spun just the same,
The power stayed, the world remained.
She lit a candle, breathed in slow,
And whispered verses soft and low.
“1999, you stitched my skin,
With floppy disks and dreams within.
You broke my heart and showed me grace,
You made my silence a sacred place.”**
Years would pass, the world would spin,
Her poems boxed and worn too thin.
But now and then, she'd find a page—
A relic from a younger stage.
And read aloud to no one there,
The girl in denim, bold and rare.
A poet of the pixel age,
Her story inked on paper’s stage.
Comments (1)
This poem really takes me back to the '90s. Remember those cassette tapes and Walkmans? I used to listen to music on my Walkman all the time. It's amazing how this girl found her voice through poetry. I wonder what inspired her to write about all those things, like the Y2K rumors and her parents' divorce. And getting her poem published must have been a huge thrill. It makes me think about how different things are now with streaming. Do you think today's teens will have the same kind of experiences with their art? It seems like everything's so instant and digital. Back then, it was all about waiting for that letter from the zine.