Anthologies

Maybe we’ll be in anthologies together.1

Perhaps the professor will look out to his students after taking attendance and begin his lecture by saying, “A and B were close friends throughout their lives. They read each other’s works and critiqued whenever necessary. It’s a surprise, really, that such close writers with an intimate knowledge of each other’s work had such different styles of writing.”2

Or maybe she’ll walk right into the class and lay her bag on the empty chair, and begin her lesson by stating, “Today we will begin talking about the short stories of A and the contemporary poetry of B,” and as the students ruffle through their books to the introduction page, she’ll warm up the work at hand by saying, “A and B grew up together in a small suburban town. And both A and B had traumatic upbringings: A’s father was an abusive alcoholic and B lived with a distant father and a cold and narcissistic stepmother.” Maybe she’ll make a reference to B being like Cinderella then, or maybe she’ll just say, “However, A and B grew up to be very different people. A graduated high school with all honors -- college summa cum laude – she had works published in several different mediums from the time she was a teenager and won numerous awards for her creative and scholastic abilities. B failed out of college after changing universities numerous times and worked as a deckhand on a boat until she wed at a young age to a businessman from Colorado. These two different ways of living life might account for their two separate styles of writing.”3

And maybe she’ll focus on your writing mostly and only breeze through mine like a prologue. She’ll tell her students, “B was never successful with her writing. It was too abstract for publishers and too plain for literary magazines. However, it is B’s writing that we remember. She personifies pain and confusion. A’s work, as melodic as the words are, is very simple and easy to figure out.” She’ll find some level of brilliance in your work to where mine feels pedestrian by association. And students will sit back and marvel at how someone like me could’ve been even remotely successful with my work while someone like you could not.4

Or maybe it will be the other way around. Maybe he’ll spend the entire lecture on me, stating that you spent too much time trying to sound like Sylvia Plath. Or maybe he’ll dismiss you and leave you off the syllabus completely, adding you as a footnote to my life, stating that my friends were all writers too.5

Or maybe no professor will walk into the dusky room with the intent of speaking about us. Maybe all we’ll be is A on page 29 in some obscure book and B in scrapbooks under your bed. 6

Either way, you’ll come knocking on my door in the afterlife, making yourself at home before I can get up. I’ll greet you with a hello as I run my bony fingers over my old college textbook of American poets, and you’ll sit down and reminisce about the time when your high school teacher told you that even Melville was misunderstood, but you will say that he said he believed you were the next Melville -- or Emerson.