The Muse's Love (reflection)

Everything I write is full of affectation and a hazy sentimentality. I feel deprived, denuded, no longer running along light-rail anymore and far too pleased with myself. Oh how easy it is to fall into smug, self-sure satisfaction. But really you’re not so important. No, not a jot. Maybe you wish you were, but you’re not. Where did that fatherly courage come from? And where did it go? It fled from the clammy grip of Midterm Two, but to what hiding spot, God only knows. Though I imagine that a not insubstantial part of regaining it would be to just start typing, start going until you pick up speed. I guess it’s just like a lady. I see why the muses are women. Imagine if you were talking to a woman for an hour, really getting into it (the conversation) and enjoying it as you found out you had a lot in common and both liked each other—imagine, after all that, that you suddenly had to go. You’d disappoint her by abandoning her, no matter what supposedly important event you were hurrying off towards.

“If he is willing to leave me to go to some stupid test,” she would think, if she were really a helluva woman “...then by being with me he must not get some great gulp of heavenly liquor, as I had hoped he might (and as I do from him). I guess he’s really only a user, or he has something more important to do… or he thinks he does, anyway, which would be the worst of all those possibilities, because I would lose knowing someone whom I like and who could like me back out of nothing more than his own stupid ignorance! He doesn’t know how much he’s losing by giving me up in exchange for something so cold and dead, nor how much of an injury it does to my heart! If he ever comes back, he'd better be on his knees, bowing and scraping, weeping tears of bitter contrition at the thought of the depth of his insult he’s inflicted. Yes, nothing else but that will suffice. If he comes back with anything less—well, then he can just go to hell! I’ll snub him a thousand times worse than what he did to me.”

And indeed, to think all this, to be this much of a woman, her love would be so powerful and unique that it would sidestep the bounds of time and space and walk invisibly alongside you as you hurried to class (you stupid man), enveloping you with a feeling of warmth that was so total and so comforting that you'd scarcely notice it.

Her love would still be giving you gifts, hanging invisible garlands over your neck and stuffing flowers into your clothes, and you, in your monumental dumbness, wouldn’t even notice it. Instead of wondering at her, you would wonder at your own so-called greatness, that had been able to keep in conversation with such an interesting person for so long. You think you carried yourself pretty well, and in fact you had, but you had made a tremendous mistake at the end when you abandoned her—and that poison, it seems, has now sunk into your very blood, at least judging from this odious atmosphere of self satisfaction that hangs around you, which is so toxic (that is, so unlike you) that it drives the spirit of your love away, and you can hardly sit there outside and study for the midterm because of the icy wind (really only the lack of warmth) that has just blown across and chilled your heart.

Button up your jacket, try to study harder—do whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. It can’t replace a love like that...

Nothing can!