The Polaroid of Poetry

A snapshot of self-love

This morning, I zombie-shuffled a half-a-mile to the coffeehouse I’ve been haunting, which is just down from my new home in Omaha.

My eyes were still covered in the soil of last night’s sleep. I didn’t sleep well. Again. Dreamt about the withering of a once-sacred friendship I once had. Again. 

I noticed that my brain kept sending signals to my little legs to pick up the pace before the heat of the day kicked in. I could feel the heat off the nearby street rise up around my stuttering penguin legs. The asphalt smelled like it was softening already.

I did a quick humidity check by pulling on the back of my shirt to see if it was sticking to my skin. Not yet—which was great because I was only a block into my morning journey to overpay for coffee. At this point in my daily walk yesterday, I was already in full sweat mode. By the time I walked into the cheery coffee shop, I looked like I had just gotten done making out with a tide pool. It was taking me a bit longer than the rest of my family to get used to Midwest humidity. While they went out and played pickleball, I sat in a bathtub of ice cubes and daydreamed about the low light of October.

As I marched down the street toward my caffeine fix, I ran my hands through the front row of my misbehaving hair. It was wilder here in this sticky weather. My normal unkempt hairstyle had now blossomed into full badger’s nest form.

I made the mistake of simply wondering what image I was presenting to the cars driving past me as I shuffled along. I thought about taking a quick photo of my humidity-ravaged face, but I couldn’t find the energy to dig my phone out of my pocket. I hated having my picture taken. Always had.

My ego saw the opening and quickly took control of the wheel of my thoughts.

In its usual cold manner, it offered me a boiled-down synopsis of how I probably looked to the outside world:

Terrible.

With every step, I started to unload on myself for every mistake I could remember making over the past several years. I ripped open scars. I had arguments with my better angels.

The rest of the walk became sponsored by my personal law firm: Lament, Regret and Anguish.

Just as I turned the corner and saw the coffeehouse about a block away, a watermelon slice-red sports car that looked like it had just been generated by a video game sped past me. The guy driving looked to be my age, and he was shirtless—carefree and without giving a single fudge about what anyone thought of him. As this dude sped away, I swear the exhaust from his car shot out clouds in the shape of dollar signs that melted into the sky above me.

This was the steroid shot my ego had been waiting for. It broke up through my veins like the Hulk through a glass door.

Immediately the questions started to come:

Where was my sports car?
Where was my confidence?
Why didn’t I try harder in high school math?
Why didn’t I come to Earth with an ounce of ambition in my bones?
Why had I chosen a life of writing poetry on Facebook instead of chasing the golden goose?

What was I even doing with my life?

What made me think that moving hundreds of miles away from my hometown would help me start to untangle the knot inside of me?

I still didn’t feel fully planted here in Omaha yet—just loosely set down, like a potted plant no one had decided where to place yet. Most days, I still felt like I was hovering a few inches above the ground, waiting for my feet to remember this was home.

“I moved here, but I hadn’t quite arrived….” my emo ego suggested I consider.

By the time I reached the coffeehouse door, I was fully glazed—
converted in sweat and sadness, like a Krispy Kreme ghost of the man I meant to become.

My ego spun the web:

Maybe I should look for an adult job instead of sitting down with a blank piece of paper and writing. Maybe I should get better at math. Maybe… maybe… maybe…

And then, of course, like some kind of cosmic wink, as I reached to open the heavy door of the coffeehouse, he walked out.

The man from the watermelon-red sports car. Now fully clothed. Polished. Cooling.

He wore a crisp, loose buttoned-up white linen shirt that looked like it had never known the concept of a wrinkle or a workday. In contrast, I was wearing a comic book t-shirt that may or may not have had lipstick marks from an ice cream cone I was briefly intimate with last week.

I stepped aside and held the door open.
He smiled at me.
I smiled back.

And just as we passed each other, he said,
“Your smile just saved my morning.”

It knocked the wind out of whatever pity balloon I’d been dragging behind me.

Because I had been unraveling.
And here was this man—this golden god of summer and SPF 50—telling me that my smile was the lifeline today.

And I remembered why I wrote poetry.

To capture the small, unwitnessed sacraments.
To turn the present into a Polaroid.
Not to impress anyone - unless someone has a fetish for a single unibrow hair unashamedly breaking through the usually orderly DMZ that separates my bushy brows. 

I took the photo just so I knew the moment happened.
Just so I didn’t miss the way grace hid inside strangers.

I hate having my picture taken. Always have.

But after this morning, I took an uncomfortable photo of myself—
not because I liked how I looked,
but because I needed to remember how I felt.
Not polished. 

Just… human.

Damn, suddenly, I am so grateful I get to be a poet. 

---

this morning
i looked like roadkill
dragged through a self-help seminar

but a stranger smiled at me
and suddenly
i forgave the heat,
my body,
and the life i didn’t chase

and when he said
“your smile just saved my morning,”
i understood:
i’ve never really been chasing success—
just looking for someone
to smile back

⸻

I’m so grateful I wrote this down.
So, for at least a day or two
I will remember:

smiles are sacraments.

Come Write With John