After years, it finally happened: I was published in a literary magazine alongside Diane, my ultimate writing enemy.
The worst part was that her poem was genuinely good, short and elegant and totally over my head. Her bio on the contributors page was shorter than mine, confident in its brevity, and informed me only that she had published a collection and that she lived in Brooklyn. Both details, however vague, proved to me how much more of a writer Diane was compared to me, a nobody with an office job in Iowa and no published book to speak of. I imagined Diane waking up every morning in her small but chic New York apartment, kissing her chiseled-jaw husband, and dashing out to nibble organic bagels and sip espresso and write at a hip café for a couple hours before dashing to her exhausting yet rewarding job as an editorial assistant for a Big Five publisher. In my daydreams, Diane occupies an existence that I've always wanted and that I know I will probably never have.