This is not for any specific one who has left me.
Years back you read my blog after we started talking again, post-silence. You said I wrote better when I was sad about you, that you were my muse. I think now that I bristled and got annoyed at that because you sounded so smug about it. I don’t want you to think so highly of yourself.
The drop is harder that way.
Something that inspires me needs to be familiar and intriguing at once. There has to be a gregorian knot somewhere in there that I haven’t yet figured out. That’s the thing about you, though. I think I know what you are. And if I actually do or don’t – why does that matter if I think my knowledge is complete enough for me? I’ve never been one to get caught up in epistemological questions. I have quite the negative capability.
My muse is pain. You see, it always feels like an old glove. I know that’s over-used, but what better way to describe something that fits so comfortably but still manages to feel like it’s suffocating you? I know the shape of the ache that sits inside me when someone leaves. I know the way I can’t vocalise anything but oh in realisation; in the times when I find out something I’ve always known but refused to see. I know how my palms feel like they have nails driven through them when I read something that makes my heart catch, as though I have crucified myself for art or with art. I know all this acutely, but I don’t know why my body reacts psychosomatically to them.
I can write about it. I can write about the empty knot tightening and tightening until I feel shaky, out of balance, reduced. I know it. I write about pain and loss and people I lose because I know the grooves of the subject well enough to not get lost in my writing; to know what I’m trying to say.
Listen, I can write about these things also because there is enough I do not understand about my pain and my eternal stupidity that writing helps me to untangle. Each time there is more.
I know you want to be important and you are, but never enough for me to really be writing about you. You see, it does matter if I’m writing about the idea of you and how I have been hurt by something else I expected you to be (and found out you weren’t). It does matter because it’s an idea and I will forget and come back to it in writing, but never with the same intensity or emotion. It does matter because I never write about you.
Even if I tried to I couldn’t.
