"Neruda"

Posted by John Sugrue in College English · Pahomov/Rhymer · B Band on

In you, everything sank. This phrase pops into my head, from an English class long past, or at least that’s how long it feels. We spent weeks upon weeks investigating every couplet, scrutinizing every stanza. I hated it. I hated talking about “author’s intent”. Why did Pablo Neruda repeat this line? Why was it a motif? Who gives a shit? In you, everything sank. I think about you and I wish I didn’t. The kid who sat next to me would always fall asleep. I couldn’t blame him. It was an easy escape. Why did I ever bother staying awake? His light snore invades my thoughts, of Neruda, of the teacher’s droning. It’s there, gently, always reminding me that there’s another way out.


In you, everything sank.


Stocks pop into my head. Our economics teacher was always right after English. He taught us all about the stock market that year. We even invested a little bit ourselves. I heard but didn’t listen. In you, everything sank. Science was next. We would skip class together, you and I. We’d sit in the stairwell and talk. Or we wouldn’t. But we always understood.

In you, everything sank. It happened on a Sunday. The Lord’s day. Funny, because we had always hated religion. I like to imagine you did it to spite God. I didn’t find out until Tuesday: you weren’t in the stairwell. They called me to the office. Your mom broke the news.  In you, everything sank. On a whim today, I visit the bridge. The cold wind whips my hair, the seagulls below call, like sirens. And I, too, am sinking.


Author's Note:

For this memory, my idea was to create not a single memory, but a series of smaller memories. This was inspired, to some extent, by Ken Kesey’s style of writing memories - a series of shorter thoughts rather than one larger one. I chose to kind of take the reader through a school day through memories to some extent. It creates a little more cohesion, which I believe is necessary in a story like this. To transition, I used the phrase: “In you, everything sank”, pulled from Pablo Neruda's Song of Despair, which was a big inspiration for the story overall: dreary, depressing, defeatist. It was the anchor that my story was based around, and inevitably the note it ends on.


Companion - “The Song of Despair” by Pablo Neruda: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/song-despair


Comments (6)

Jason Lam (Student 2019)
Jason Lam

Very nice work. The language of the memory was incredible that it sent shivers down my spine. Literally. I really liked that it wasn't just this one big memory, but a combination of multiple and then having a sort of plot twist at the end to keep the reader on the edge of their seat and wanting more. Just one thing, I believe that it was Atwood who had many short memories while Kesey was the one with fewer longer memorites.

Olivia Musselman (Student 2019)
Olivia Musselman

This is great! The use of repetition was so fitting for this and had me thinking about the significance of that sentence, "In you, everything sank." I'm still thinking about it! At the beginning, I had a lot of questions, and a lot of those questions were answered, but I love how you didn't reveal everything. When you revealed something, it was discreet. Lovely!

Lucien Hearn (Student 2019)
Lucien Hearn

Bro this is absolutely beautiful. In a lot of stories, you can kinda tell where it's going, but you wonderfully meld the memories together and they flow as if it were an entire life's story I had just read.

Afi Koffi (Student 2019)
Afi Koffi

Strong piece. I really like your decision to use the phrase 'In you, everything sank' as a transition. Because it was also a big part of the theme of the story, it worked very well.

Nile Ward (Student 2019)
Nile Ward

Reading this piece, I did start thinking about times that I had like this in middle school. It made the story flow well because of this. I'm still thinking about what that quote means – it is very vague, which is why there are so many answers to what it means, how it can be used, etc.