30 Day Letter Challenge--Day Nine: Someone You Wish You Could Meet

Dear Maya Angelou,

I promise I don't just want to meet you because I was named after you. That's a big part of what got me interested in you as a child, but over the years I've become incredibly drawn and attached to your work. As cheesy and stalker-ish as this sounds, I feel like we're connected somehow. Being someone's namesake should be some sort of cosmic connection, right? When I'm going through a dark time, I turn to India.Arie when I want music, and I turn to you when I want poetry. Sometimes the woman I imagine the speaker of your poems to be is myself, reminding me of my glory. Sometimes she's the self I imagine I will one day be, telling me that I'll get through this to a brighter day. Sometimes she's my mother or my grandmother or a woman from the topmost branches of my family tree, telling me that she has been there too. Your words, they comfort me, and inspire me to reach higher and walk taller. You remind me why I do all that I do. 
Sometimes I ask myself if I poet because of you. I haven't been able to come up with an answer to that question yet, but it goes without question that you were enough of an influence on my childhood that some part of my interest in wordsmith-ship must have been inspired by your work.

One of the memories my father always smiles back on is of a day we were in the Pleasantville public library. If we were in Pleasantville, I was in the fourth grade. I was checking out a biography of you, and most likely a volume or two of your work, along with whatever else I was currently reading, and the librarian who was helping me asked if I was doing a school project. I must have given her a strange look, because she elaborated, "You're checking out all these books on Maya Angelou." I cocked my head to the side and said, "No, I just like her," and grabbed my books and walked out. My dad says she stared at us until we pulled out of the parking lot, and he likes to reminisce about this as being one of the things that marked me as "different."

 It's one of my absolute greatest dreams in life that you will come to Princeton before I graduate. I will quite literally kick, bite, and claw my way to a ticket to see you. Going back to cheesy and stalker-ish, it would genuinely be an honor to be graced with your very presence.

Thank you,

Maya