Everyone always writes these great lengthy pieces of prose discussing what would happen if you fell in love with a writer, or if a writer fell in love with you. But what happens if a writer falls in love with a writer?
I bet they’re so full of words to whisper into one another’s ears that they bubble over with glee and try to dismantle each other’s bones, just to get into the marrow where the consonants and syllables lie. One of them probably has a dictionary with the other’s name as the only entry, and they’ll read it over and over again every day until they’ve memorized the definition.
They’ll undress so quietly that it’s almost like breathing underwater, and their hands will form poems with only the interlacing of their fingers. One will travel the curve of the other’s body with their tongue, pray to it like an altar, find all the hidden hollows full of magnificent silence. I bet the bed will look like a hurricane tore it apart when they’re done, because they’ll have spent all that time making love with vowels. That will be the only sound during the whole process, and if you’re lucky enough to listen in, you can string them together to form words.
One writer will sneak quick glances at the other when they’re riding on the subway, and try to think of ways to capture that beauty in their next novel. They’ll unlock each other’s hearts and throw away the key. Whole days will be spent reading Fitzgerald and Plath out on the veranda, sipping lemonade and listening to spoken word poems by the greats.
When two writers fall in love all that desire, all those words, all that prose and poetry, will generate enough of a force to power a windmill. They’ll want to rip each other apart like surgeons, go digging in one another’s spines until they find the hidden seeds that will bloom into their next novels.
There will be broken hearts, sure. But when two writers have broken hearts, they’ll spend lonely nights smoking cigarettes on a rooftop over the city, and the wind grazing their cheeks will feel like a lover’s kiss, and they’ll want to go back home and settle their differences, make love till they bleed ink.
Their apartments will be filled with pens and paper, countless passages of poetry highlighted and annotated all over the floor. It’ll be like a bloodbath. Neither of them will get out alive, because writers kill each other for their words. And there’s a kind of love in that.
When two writers fall in love, they’ll be so full of prose and sentences and sestinas and anaphoras that they won’t know what to do with them. They’ll be sinking like ships in the current of their longing for one another.
When two writers fall in love they’ll never stop writing about each other. They’ll be immortal.