WRITING OBSTACLE
Write a poem or short paragraph that contains a palindromic sentence.
A palindromic sentence can be read the same forwards or backwards. Only one of your lines needs to be a palindrome, so think carefully about how it will fit with the theme of your writing.
Want What I Want
When a friend asks me,
“Where do you want to go?”
I give them my answer.
So we go.
When another friend asks me,
“What do you want to do?”
I give them my answer.
So we do.
When I tell a friend,
“I don’t care where we go,”
I wait for them to say,
“Neither do I.”
But really, of course I care.
When I tell another friend,
“I don’t care what we do,”
I wait for the inevitable,
“Neither do I,”
Which just makes me feel unfair.
Because the truth is
I know where I want to go,
I know what I want to do.
But I don’t want to be selfish.
Yet deep down inside
I want what I want
Because I know that I want
And it consumes me until finally,
All I can think in the moment is
‘Want... I... want.’
This is interesting. I like your progression. First you are telling your friend what you want to do and where you want to go, then you start to hold back out of a fear of being selfish, and at the end you are left yearning for what you know you want.
This makes it really relatable. We all do this to some degree, or at least I do. There are stages where you are screaming on the inside for what you want, but at some point you get so used to not responding and getting what you want that you stop thinking about what you want. The use of the palindrome is good too. It seems like the chant from a part of you that died.
Not sure if that’s what you were going for, but it felt really deep to me. There is a lot of implied emotion that I’m picking up on.
I wanted it to be a bit open to interpretation, to be quite honest. One of my favorite things to read and write about is honest relatability- like the little weird or stupid things we feel like we are the only ones who do when really almost everyone experiences it.
That being said, I personally have friends who don’t like making the decisions of where we go out to dinner, what we do to hang out, etc. After time and time again of being honest and ALWAYS getting my way, though, I start to feel like they’re just saying they ‘don’t care’ just to make me happy, which makes me feel guilty and selfish. In turn, my response usually starts to just mimick theirs in hopes that they’ll tell me what they really want. BUT, as someone who is definitely selfish most of the time, that feeling of an itch needing to be scratched when I just REALLY want that something is almost suffocating, so that’s what I wanted to write about :)
I also know that feeling of suffocation isn’t uncommon at all, so that’s why I wanted to leave it a bit open to interpretation. It takes shape in all kinds of different forms.
