40 Days of Living Like a Poet, Day 1: I Lived in a Poem Once (It Was the City)
What happens when you live inside a story?
I live in a world where I’m the main character, and sometimes I think the writer puts my story aside. For what, though? A little coffee break? A purposeful rest? Maybe just because the story isn’t clear, and breathing life into though and out onto the page takes some time.
Too much time, if you ask me.
But I play the role I am meant to play, day in and day out. Sometimes it’s a somber fiction, other days a bright first chapter of a romance novel as the readers anticipate that inevitable meet-cute. I avoid opening my eyes on the days that it appears I’m sinking into a psychological thriller where — plot twist — I am both victim and perpetrator.
And then there are the days where I’m a nameless narrator in the middle of quiet poetry. But quiet doesn’t always mean meek. It is a contemplative quiet, a blossoming movement towards the city center.
And that’s where my main character energy hits its full capacity.
I’ve lived in city after city, walked sidewalks that are cracked, broken, smooth new. Some sidewalks have seen thousands of shoe soles just that day. Others have been forgotten to time and a faster way of getting to wherever I should be going.
I walk this city as if I knew it intimately. As if the soul my flesh is wrapped around had never left, lifetime after lifetime of catching a breath of sweet summer air only to be hit with another whiff of something offensive because you can never remember which day is trash collection.
The writer always wants to make it perfect for me. The writer types furiously to get it out, that backspace coming in handy when it’s time to refine the message. All the writer wants for me is to craft that perfect day, that perfect love, and as a result, a perfect life. They write as if this was the only way for them to live in something yet to be experienced, and if the writer works a little more to craft the right sentence, the most perfect paragraph of their life, then just maybe I can be the creation that becomes reality.
