In my senior year English class to stay in honors, we all had to recite a poem from memory. I chose “Altruism” by Molly Peacock. I made my selection mostly based on length and content—I knew I needed something that had a plot or coherent line of thought to help me remember the words. I still don’t completely understand the meaning behind the poem, but even without understanding, it seemed to resonate with me while I recited it to myself over and over again. It ponders the relationship between a loved one and oneself inside ones own mind in a way that helped me reflect on some of my own interpersonal relationships. My personal interpretation is that to appreciate someones presence, you have to recognize their mind—their emotions and vulnerabilities and person more deeply than we usually do. When I consider how I see other people in my daily life, I realize that I mostly only think about their them in relation to me, and never consider their experiences and emotions in and of themselves. When Molly Peacock writes “like those waves off the backyard grill you can see the next yard through, though not well — just enough to know that off to the right belongs to someone else, not you” she means that to really know someone, you have to look through the haze that comes off of life and off of your own thoughts and imagine how their experience would look if it weren’t so blurred by everything going on in and around you.