Muse

 

 

I take my brush and dip it in the clear water, and the color bleeds from the bristles like a storm cloud dangling a dozen tornado fingers. I watch the water change color and try not to think about that damn song. You’re going from bar to bar playing it. I’m sure it seeps sympathy for you into your audience like the indigo seeps from my brush. “He’s so sensitive,” your chords whisper to them.

When the storm clouds push down on the landscape, what the land is becomes irrelevant. There is nothing but all-consuming tornado then. When the paint gives color to the water, the water becomes the color. The color does not become the water.

Sometimes your friends will stop me in the store or on the street. “You really hurt him,” they’ll scold. “Have you heard that song he wrote about you? You didn’t even explain why you left him. You just disappeared.”

When I loved you, I was always the land swept away by the storms of your creativity. You were never the water, bleeding out the colors I loaded on my brush. It took me years to realize I was nothing but muse to you.

Next to my garbage basket but never in it is my box of evidence. Only I can read the contents. There is the apology card that is ripped up and taped back together for the night you threw my easel through the window. You got a whole album out of your manufactured regret for that. The now desiccated daisies you picked on your way back from the tantrum produced by my demand for time alone to paint transformed into the sweetest, most lilting melody I’ve ever heard. My half-finished sketch of you playing your guitar uncrumpled in your imagination and became your most requested ballad.

I win when I don’t need the box, when I feel my own pain louder than I can feel yours. For you, a muse cannot also be a creator. Your muse is an echo chamber that amplifies your passion. She is a pocket of air that is siphoned up to move the notes into place. She is the water, not the color.

Does it matter that I left you? I am still your muse. You and your fans are still demanding that I hear your pain. You are still insisting on coloring me with your emotions. You didn’t have enough sympathy to notice when I left myself. It does not surprise me that you are bewildered that I left you.