Looking through old files, I found a couple of untitled notepads from almost a decade ago. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a poet so I scribbled relentlessly (in the bus to school, during classes, during break periods, during laboratory lectures). At thirteen, one of my mother's friends told me to carry notebooks and pen and I took that to heart (I went through several dozen notebooks before I settled on my staple now, a small venzi pocket-sized one).
During high school and at the peak of my obsession with Lord of the Rings, I scribbled "Turin Turambar Turun Ambartanen" on my notebooks, the text interspersed regularly among notes about geography or whatever it was we were learning at the time. I must have been thirteen, a freshman, when my natural science teacher picked up a notebook as I took down notes in her class. She looked at that phrase (it means master of doom by doom mastered) and back down at me; she looked at once perplexed and revolted but she hid it masterfully and then turned away. I would encounter that same frustration in the next four years, often mingled with some shade of pity.
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