you write an essay, you know it’s bad but you hope it’s not, you send it to a friend and hope she won’t be brutal, she is—painfully so—and tells you your essay ‘smells of panic’ and must be rewritten, you panic, cry a little, cry a lot, put your head down on your desk, panic some more, and then sit back up because you are in your third year of college and you are okay with disappointment and failure and not being instantly the best at everything, and you ask for help—something you are generally loth to do—and suddenly there it is, the argument that’s been hidden under all the stress and the desperate attempts to make sense of poetry, and you find it and you hold on to it and you write it down and it makes sense and you make yourself a cup of tea and get right back to writing your essay from scratch, because you’re all grown up now and you can handle it.