before (part 1)
the story behind my poem "We Catch Up Over Beers After Your Divorce"
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Before John’s divorce, they separated. Before that, an open marriage. Before that, we both lived in Vietnam, but John was in the north in Hanoi teaching English and I was in the south in Saigon teaching English and we never found the time to meet in the middle and catch up.
We met in a poetry class in college. He hates to admit it now, but back then, he was obsessed with Jack Kerouac and Beatniks and San Francisco; he even failed the final of that class when he and his friends drove down to San Francisco from Bellingham, cans of PBR littering the car floor, Bob Dylan crooning from the tape deck.
We didn’t fall in love but something like it. He thought I was bound to make it big as a writer, and I liked someone believing in me more than I believed in myself.