A Chaotic Ode

Dear Will, You didn't just write plays— you orchestrated the chaos in our curriculum. Your quills were not feathers, they were timebombs in Elizabethan iambs, detonating in every semester we tried to survive. You made us fall in love with dead Danish princes and witches who chant midterm doom. You served soliloquies as survival manuals, and called our mental breakdowns—"comic relief." I’ve wept with Ophelia in syllabus margins, cheated death with Caesar in unit tests, and danced with Puck on the ruins of unfinished assignments. You made me romanticize guilt, ghosts, and growing insanity— Lady Macbeth visits me in dreams with her “Out, damn spot!” while I try scrubbing anxiety off my GPA. Will, You’re the reason we quote tragedies in love letters, and write essays that bleed metaphors like Brutus bled loyalty. Even now, as I stare at a blank answer script, you whisper through my pen: “The rest is silence.” So this April 23rd, I won’t just say Happy Birthday. I’ll light a candle, not for you— but for every student still deciphering your divine disasters. With tears, awe, and caffeine— Your unwilling understudy, English Honours Batch of Broken