The Muse

It was love. It was love and you were sure of it, dreadful of the blooming cavity in your heart, filling and sinking like an inconsistent tide. It washed over you, dragging in fragmented images of her.

 You savored each memory, forcing your brain to recall every scent or taste she led you towards. When you closed your eyes, you could see her dark hair swishing behind her as she sprinted towards a sassafras tree. From it, she plucked a glove-shaped leaf. She shook out her hands, causing her reddish-brown leather jacket to fall down her forearms, and she started to grind the leaf with pinched fingers. She smiled up at you and smeared the severed green onto her palm. Smell, she said, hovering her hands below your nostrils. 

Like Root Beer, you smiled, instantly transported back to high school, A&W with friends in your parents’ basement. You wanted to hold her root beer hands, wanted her to tell you that she loved you. Only you. All of you. You wanted to spend nights with her in bed, instead of just picturing her face as you fell asleep. When you closed your eyes, there she was waiting, smiling patiently. Yet, you never got her nose right. It was merely a blip in your memory, fuzzy as soon as you focused on it. It must have been striking, defining in her side profile, right? Or maybe it was small and soft, to not distract from her eyes. That’s what kept you up at night. 

Nights were the worst. From your apartment, there was a feeble view of the moon. Feeble, yet existent, contrasting her old apartment. She rented it from a widowed woman, and lived in the basement. The only windows were located at the very tops of the walls, long and rectangular, providing a distorted street-side view. She had a solitary outlook of the moon from her bed, and said goodnight to it each night. Her moon was always full, mostly because it was not the moon, but a streetlamp, fixed in the night sky. 

You liked the idea of a streetlamp moon, you liked the idea of If I Didn’t Know Better… a classic ignorance-is-bliss situation. You were fond of the escape, the relief of being an unemployed, unmarried, uninspired novelist. She told you that she liked the escape, escape was okay, she said. In fact, she claimed, she refuses to watch the movie if she read the book- a naive strategy to preserve her original ideas of characters.  

She made an exception for Harry Potter. One can’t just imagine all that magic. 

You disagreed. Not all magic can be seen, you said, that’s why you write. The reader must be able to picture everything inside their head; a teenage boy ridden with acne, a wet pant leg from kneeling in the dew, a redhead woman shaking her head No. 

No, love can’t be seen. One must picture it, you sighed. 

She reached out her hand in consolation, her slender fingers almost touching the hair on your arms, leaving you in goosebumps. You closed your eyes, desperately trying to feel her touch, then opened them, disgusted. Shutting the reddish-brown leather-bound notebook, you set down your pen. You were another Pygmalion, enamored by his own creation. Looking around at your barren apartment, at the fountain pen sketches of her. Dark, long hair, and big brown eyes. A different nose each time. Freckles. Clear skin. 

You held your tiny notebook close, cupping its spine with your fingers, its body supported by your forearm. The leather cover rested on a vein, listening in to your blood pumping, a weak attempt at a transfusion. You were called a hopeless romantic growing up, teased by your sister and mother. But not the flowers at your door, Say Anything kind of hopeless romantic, but the hopeful kind. Hopeful that maybe one day you would walk down the street and see your ink-woven figure in a coffee shop, sipping tea with her slender, sassafras-scented hands.