A few years ago, not long before my dinner with my friend Matt, with most of this story uncomfortably stuffed into the corners of my head and almost-but-never-really forgotten, I moved to Washington, D.C. I was upstairs in my loft unpacking boxes of books. Or at least I was supposed to be unpacking. As is usual when I’m unpacking, I was lazily browsing and reminiscing as opposed to putting any effort into systematically removing and locating the items I was supposed to be paying attention to in the first place.

I was thumbing through some of my surviving old notebooks and journals when I saw a stray piece of paper flip out of the box and flutter to the floor next to my foot. I wasn’t sure why, but my attention kept returning to that fallen piece of paper. Then it dawned on me.

It was the Mystery Poem.

I’m not entirely sure where it had come from, but it had obviously been stashed inside one of those old journals, where it had stayed safely hidden from me for close to twenty years. If I had had it along the way, I’m sure there were various times that I would have shredded and burned it, used it to console myself in my grief or to try to make sense of my past. Instead, it had sat unintentionally nestled between some pages of bad poetry I’d written. It had managed to remain undetected all this time, until I was ready to deal with it.

I sat on the floor of the loft for an hour just staring at this tiny scrap of paper and reading it over and over again.

Teacher

bring me to heaven

or leave me alone.

Why make me work so hard

when everything’s spread around

open, like forest’s poison oak turned red

empty sleeping bags hanging from a dead branch.

I’d remembered it almost perfectly.

It seemed more dramatic and melancholy than I remembered. It felt more antagonistic than I remembered—like the writer was blaming the Teacher for whatever situation they were in.

But what did it mean? Was I supposed to be the Teacher? Or was that Laura?

Reading it felt like being back at square one. I had no clue what it meant. I had no clue what it was. I had no clue why she had given it to me. I had no clue why she had insisted on not answering my questions.

“Just think about it for a while. You’ll eventually figure it out.”

The Mystery Poem was the only relic of Laura’s and my friendship. I had no photos, no letters, no cards. This was all that was left. Yet, twenty years later I still felt clueless, dense, and like I was missing something frustratingly obvious.

Over the years I had made various stabs at trying to root out its origins. With the evolution of the Internet, I’d periodically Googled parts of the Mystery Poem. I’d pretty much given up, assuming that Laura had written it herself. With it sitting there in my hands, I decided to try one more time. I entered “teacher bring me to heaven” and started combing through the W.A.S.P. lyrics and early home-school education materials that littered the results. On the second or third page, I noticed the phrase “or leave me alone” in the search results quote. The site was in German but contained the first three lines of the poem and a reference to a book by Allen Ginsberg called Sad Dust Glories.

A week later a used chapbook arrived in the mail. It was a very rare collection of poems that Allen Ginsberg had written during the summer of 1974. After combing through the book, I found it. The Mystery Poem was actually a stanza, the second stanza of a long poem, one of three in the chapbook, a poem called “To The Dead.”

I slumped against the wall as I read the first lines of the poem.

You were here in earth—in cities

Now you are not.

Where are you?

Bones in the ground,

thoughts in my mind.

What was this? I thought. My first reaction was that it seemed better suited for Laura than for me. In fact, it was perfectly suited for Laura. It made a knot form in my stomach.

Then came the stanza I’d been carrying in my head for twenty years.

I stopped reading.

This was really making far more sense as something I would say to Laura, rather than she to me. It was also a prophecy. She was in cities, then she was gone. Bones in the ground. Dead branches. But there was no way she could have ever known where I’d be when I’d figure out where the poem was from—no way she could possibly know what would happen to us both in between.

But she didn’t say it was about her from my perspective. She specifically said the poem, or rather the stanza, was just “from me to you”—which really told me nothing.

From there, the parallels kind of fell off a cliff. The poem rambles on about pine trees, Buddhism, and sleeping with young boys. It doesn’t even end with a lingering deep thought—it just ends.

It didn’t seem to answer much. This poem was about Allen Ginsberg, not Eric Nuzum, and not Laura Patterson. Like everything about Laura, the more I learned just made things less certain, made me feel farther away rather than closer.