It doesn’t always work, writing.
Sometimes your muse goes on vacation to the Bahamas. You wish that you’d gone with her. She’s beautiful and her skin is golden and you’re wishing yours was too, but instead you’re covering up your pasty day-glow legs under your capris. You imagine feeling your toes in the sand, instead of actually being there and you don’t think that’s good enough and the only words you can get out are a rant written with your favorite pen.
Sometimes, you end up binge-watching TV shows instead of getting anything done. Sometimes you freak out about your weight and what you eat and you download this app that you hope will tell you that you’re not eating a bunch of junk, when you know that you are, and it’s the reason your capris are snug. The app isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know. It’s not going to validate your pant size. It’s not going to change that you’re eating junk because your muse is on freaking vacation and you didn’t get to go because you have to be the responsible one and do all of the adulting until she brings her obnoxious behind home!
In the mean time, you’re stuck with your potato chips and your TV show and your favorite pen not knowing what to write.
But before you know it, before you even get a chance to realize it, she’s home. And you really, really missed her.
Then you start churning out a blog post. You’re pretty sure no one is going to read it, but you don’t care because your muse is back and she’s singing in your ear. She’s reminding you that you know the lyrics to “You’re the One That I Want” by heart and that when you were younger, you could sing like Olivia Newton John. Of course, that was several years ago, before you smoked.
You start to get down on yourself about the smoking, when your muse reminds you that you quit four years ago and there’s something else you have to talk about. Something you have to tell people, something important about addiction and how it can kill you, or you can kill it. It’s visceral, this sense of overcoming and when you realize what you have accomplished, you start to dance.
The muse joins you, takes the lead. She takes you around the room, then out the front door and around the world. You travel to places you have never been, places you never knew you wanted to be. You meet people and see and do things that you never knew you had inside you until the moment arrives. The moment when she stops and says, “Okay. We’re finished.”
That’s the one thing you fear more than anything else in the world, that moment. You worry about it so much sometimes that you send your muse fleeing to Grand Bahama so she can stick her toes in the sand without you, while you find your way back to sanity without her. She comes back when you realize that you can move on without her, that life will still have value even if her voice falls silent.
This is a good thing to know.
Still, deep down you know that life is better with her in it and you pray that the moment that she decides she’s done with you, is just shortly after the moment that you die so that you never have to know a life without her in it.