So, here’s the thing.

Careful readers of the Blog will know that I have been in a relationship with Poetry that pretty much defines “long term.”  It started back in 1987 as a schoolgirl crush.  Poetry and I were introduced by our mutual friend Emily.  You know, Emily

This is the only photograph I could find of myself around the age I first met Poetry. In case you were wondering, yes, this is a photograph of me posing next to a scene of the Crucifixion made out of Legos, possibly for a project at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School. And in case you were wondering, yes, the fact that that one cross is white was, indeed, meant to signify that it was Christ's cross. Also, you're welcome.

Dickinson?  The girl with auburn hair who always wore white dresses and hung out in the back of the English book, pretending that she wanted nothing more than for no one to pay attention to her when, in reality, that was exactly what she wanted?  That Emily.  And she was right about Poetry — Poetry was just so eloquent, so elegant.  Poetry was witty and charming and clever, and Poetry always knew the right thing to say.  Plus, I loved the way a page looked on Poetry — Poetry could make even the cheapest newsprint-quality-bargain-paperback-stock look good.

In a way, Poetry and I grew up together.  Poetry was patient, kind, and never jealous of my friendship with Fiction — and why should Poetry be jealous, really?  I might dally a little, exploring my options with plot structure and setting, but we both knew I’d come running back soon enough.  Even when, in graduate school, I abandoned Poetry for a year and took up with Fiction, who had shown up in a workshop wearing these totally hot asterisks and quad spaces, Poetry still didn’t mind.  Poetry remained cool, cucumber-like.  Graduate school was close enough to college for Poetry to be sure I was just experimenting, so Poetry went on with Po-business.

But after a while, I started to wonder if perhaps Poetry was a little too confident, a little too casual.  I started to wonder if I was putting too much into our relationship and getting too little back.  After all, I was spending every spare second and dollar and dime I had on Poetry, and what was Poetry doing?  Going on dates with, like, everyone else, including, like, all of my ex-boyfriends.  Poetry had, shall we say, a problem with commitment — or, at least, it seemed, a problem with commitment to me.  It seemed like Poetry had gone out to the bookstores of the world wearing a dust jacket for just about everyone I’d known.  We did get close to a walk down the bookstore aisle, but the ring vanished from my finger before I could even figure out what kind of flowers I wanted — and due to a natural disaster.  Which is basically the definition of a sign, and a sign so extreme it couldn’t be ignored even someone with the most delusional crush on Poetry.

I didn’t mean to start a thing with Creative Nonfiction.  Really and truly, I mean it.  Creative Nonfiction always seemed too brusque, too brutally honest, too willing to tell the truth and the whole truth, so help your mom.  If I saw Creative Nonfiction a party, I pretended I dropped something and turned around and away.  Otherwise, I knew I’d be talking about my most embarrassing middle school moments until we ended up on the sidewalk, Creative Nonfiction patting my head and handing me Kleenex while I breathed into a paper bag.

Okay, okay.  I had a brief flirtation with Creative Nonfiction in high school, but that was just because I realized that if I squinted and looked to the left and ignored the lack of line-breaks, Creative Nonfiction kinda looked a lot like Poetry.  Back then, Poetry had my heart and didn’t worry and just went off to smoke behind the high school with the kids who wore black turtlenecks and read Nietzsche. Which was, of course, typical.

When Creative Nonfiction showed up again ten years later, it was different.  Before I knew it, we were spending all of our time together.  I mean, Creative Nonfiction listened.  Creative Nonfiction cared.  Creative Nonfiction cared more about what Lauren said about my buck teeth than how buck teeth could become a metaphor for global climate change.  Maybe Creative Nonfiction and I would have the same problems, but at least they’d be new problems.  And Poetry didn’t seem to care — and was busy whisking people who wore black and read Nietzsche in high school off to Breadloaf anyway.

But Poetry is, if anything, sneaky.  Add to that seductive.  No matter how many times I swore we were finished and unfriended the fake Walt Whitman on Facebook and erased the Poetry Foundation’s website from my contacts, I found myself running into Poetry.  A poster on campus, a forward from a friend, in a centerfold in the American Poetry Review wearing white space too gorgeous to be believed.  Before I knew it, I was writing notes for Poetry — at first in the margins of my notebooks, then scrawled all over the pages.  Poetry sat on my bookshelf in the corner and grinned.  Poetry knew I couldn’t stay away too long.

I realized I had to find some way to make it work, with both of them.  I realized that I had put too much emphasis on PDA — Published Displays of Authorship — and needed desperately to build up my relationships instead.  I realized that Poetry and Creative Nonfiction and I needed to be just friends — and as soon as I realized this, I was happier.

I won’t lie: it isn’t always easy.  I still get disappointed when Poetry responds to my hard work with one of those generic notes Xeroxed on a half-sheet of paper asking me to subscribe to a magazine.  I still feel a twinge of jealousy when I see Poetry taking someone else out at Border’s.  Then I remember that this is just Poetry’s public side, which can really be a frog.  I remember that the most important thing is how I feel about Poetry — and how working on Poetry makes me feel about myself.