Dear Shane Koyczan,

You may not know me but I know you. I know you like I know my favorite childhood TV show’s star character, I’ve watched you for a while now and sat staring in wonder as your words bounce around in my eyes, but I sit on the other side of a screen. I look up to you like I’ve just found a diamond above my head set in stone surrounded by coals that weren’t put under enough pressure to change into something great just yet. When I saw you and your poems, it was amazing. I have so many words that I could use to describe the way I saw your poems, but somehow I was left speechless. Your first poem I ever saw was of course the one that went viral just long enough for people to catch, but were too eager to move on with their lives so they cure themselves of your infectious inspiration. I’ve watched “To This Day” so many times that I can now recite little bits and parts of those seven emotional minutes like putting a puzzle together, starting from the outsides and finding other randoms chunks that fit along the way so that I’m only able to remember parts here and there, all floating around inside the starting frame. Your puzzles are those thousand pieced ones, however, so I may not be able to remember every line before I am ready to move on and start fitting together the pieces of another one of your poems. I can sure keep trying though, and while I may not be able to put the whole puzzle together myself, I will always remember the beautiful picture you painted on the cover of the box that first drew me in to put it together.

You may not hear me but I hear you. I hear you like an aggressive songbird, loud and demanding to be heard above the rest. You sing your songs so differently and so beautifully that you take the spotlight away from the others and they just look like regular birds, tweeting their same tune in the same tree so that people walking by don’t really pay any mind, but when they walk by your tree they stop and say “wait... listen to that pretty bird sing.” I can see your poems as something amazing and difficult to imagine, like a glass-blown dragon at a renaissance fair where everyone stops and gasps at the craftsmanship and the intricate colors, but shake their heads at the price tag because the price is so high that it’s priceless to you.

You may not see my poems but I see yours. I see them like a new color I’ve never known, never was able to open my eyes to. Reading your pieces was like putting on prescription glasses for the first time without knowing I even needed them and saying “wow my eyes were AWFUL before now.” And now that I’ve seen this new color with these glasses, I can’t help but try using what I’ve seen, using this new color to paint onto empty canvases inside frames that look like the cheap kind you find at the supermarket, when your look like they were carved out of powerful trees. But maybe I’ll learn to build my own frames to be as magnificent as yours someday.

You may not have read my poems but I have read yours. And yours are what inspired me to make mine. Thank you Shane Koyczan for being the TV star behind the screen that I needed to see shooting threw the screen and into the sky, so that I could make my wish on it wishing to write like you. And it started coming true when I found the motivation and inspiration to pick up a pencil and just try, because To This Day- you are still my inspiration.