Writing Each Other
By Amanda Pendley
Writing Each Other
We fight over poetry
What is worthy and what is not
We fight for words to be published
And pressed in between pages
Where they live without air
Ink dry and unlively
But still born and made so that they will never become
Dead
And does this go for the world too?
Does the universe fight over us?
Which traffic lights we miss so we can
Look out the window
And see some broken fence
Or some crack in the asphalt
Or some mark of resisting earth
Faded green and worn
In its winter roots
She asked me why I don’t like strawberries
And I can’t help but think
There’s someone in another bubble of time
Some ethereal space above us, sculpting the world
Arguing with their cowriter named Sharon or Susan or whoever
over the specifics of my character development
Such as my dislike for berries and creatures with no legs
While they’re writing my manuscript
Saying “that doesn’t make sense”
“that contradicts everything about her”
and “would she even do that in the first place”
with hands smudging the ink
And maybe that’s why I get a little blurry
and dazed out sometimes
All of our blips are just coffee stains on screenplays
And words in the sand washed away by the salt
And chalk faded to wet running colors in the storm
And that’s why we freeze up when we’re giving a presentation
Or accidentally tell the drive thru worker to enjoy their ice cream too
Or talk in our sleep
Or don’t say what we need to say
So that one person will stay
And how maybe if we could just remember that thing to say
That thing to say
That thing to say
That went away with the wet colors down the drain
As quickly as we forget in that moment
what we desperately need to remember
Maybe that’s why we’re so blurry
All while Sharon or Susan or whoever and their cowriter are up there in that timeless aura
Creating who I’m supposed to be
And laughing at the parts they messed up
And crying at the parts they got right
And laughing at the parts they got right
And crying at the parts they messed up
With their decisions to make me hate strawberries
And go five miles over the speed limit so I missed waiting at that light
And seeing some broken fence
Or some crack in the asphalt
Or some deceased patch of earth
As they keep on trying to find the right milestones for my story
And I wonder if they know that I’m watching them write my
character development that doesn’t always make sense
At the same time that I’m writing theirs
Is the world not just the endless process of writing ourselves
and writing each other
Until they smudge and blend together
so that everyone is a little bit of everyone
And our poetry that we fight for
And fight over
What should be screamed and what should be left unsaid
is found barely breathing
In the airless seals between the pages
Fighting to live
And fighting to live
And fighting to say what we need to say
So that there’s a purpose for fighting
For our lives to be written in the first place.
Amanda Pendley is a Kansas City-based writer. She is also the editor of Elementia, a teen literary magazine.