Sonnet 138

This personal essay was submitted as part of Catalyst’s 2020 Writing Contest. To view more submissions from the Writing Contest, please visit utcatalyst.org/writing-contest

Photo Credit: Kelly Jensen

Courtesy of Pixabay

“When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies,”  

—William Shakespeake, Sonnet 138

Words uttered by my English teacher, her voice rising with truth, only to fall to quiet equivocation. My hand scribbles absentmindedly on a sheet of paper as I make note of figurative devices, “metonymy” and “anaphora” and “assonance,” words far too meager to render justice to  the poem’s meaning. For I, in that moment, could overwhelmingly relate to the speaker.

Although I am not a Shakespearean character allowing his love to convince him of certain untruths, I am  wholly guilty of believing the lies that my own love spins. How could I not? My love blooms into magnificence, into worlds of infinite possibilities with flying shoemakers and demon kings and talking owls, into pools of borrowable strength and wisdom and courage.

Ground up, my love is the creation of a fictitious world from the dots that give my i’s meaning and the majestic curls of my j’s to the whiplike slashes of my k’s. When it is scribbled onto weathered notebooks by my own hand, I am swallowed whole into obsession—then regurgitated with a sore Opponens pollicis. And as the hard lines of the clock move in parallel with my galloping heart, “time” eventually becomes just another word in my love’s abundant arsenal.  

My love was born from necessity. After a childhood spent scanning through library shelves for tales of blood-thrumming adventure, I eventually exhausted the best and the worst. Soon, there  was a sparkly scratchpad lying in my lap beckoning me with promises of help. And help me, it did. One hour later, it was seeped with a pell-mell of words about a noble princess and the fire breathing, winged dragon that she threw her leg over. I was seated at a desk but once I fell for my love’s lies, I too was in the sky, a wonderful, terrible beast underneath me and hopeful fingers stroking the top of the world. Successive twirls and pirouettes of my pencil created a messy string of words, coherent in their misshapen unity for “wings” and “magic” made no sense alone but together raised thousands of needle-thin bumps on my skin. With that, I claimed my love as my own. In all its maladroit disorder, it was just that: mine.  

But the poem’s speaker was right. Active compliance becomes us both, and my love persists with its lies. Goblins do not roam the earthen realm, and I cannot put on a pair of shoes, shift my  weight to my tiptoes, and expect to fly. However, while demon disciples laud a king sitting in a throne of fire and assassins race on horses of rippling sinew in my stories, I listen as my calculus teacher weaves dark magic in his explanation of multivariable vectors, and regularly careen along the slope of economics’ PPF curves. Inside Campbell’s Biology, I wade through calm seas of cell membrane phospholipids, encountering stray protein icebergs, or tag along on Darwin’s jaunt to the Galapagos. During geology lessons, I hike merrily over gleaming Corundum jewels and skip across the nervous system’s nodes of Ranvier. As a student, my life has increasingly become an act in balance; yet, artistic recreation, rooted into my capabilities by my love, laces otherwise bland things with a tenor of adventure.  

In my own penned fable, there is the Shoemaker whose rigid principle reminds me to do right, always. The Demon King, voice ringing with fire and arrogance, who kindles my heart in times I would otherwise sit with tied vocal cords. Thowl who whispers to never judge a book by its cover, cheekiness meriting a name far greater than “the owl” with a removed “e.” And of course the princess and her dragon that started it all, decidedly capturing my love in rivulets of connection between my mind and my hand.  

My love—it may lie to me, but by it I will gladly be deceived.