The Wind is Not in My Sails

I had a firm grip on the ever evasive muse for a good while. Almost a year, not quite. Some people never manage to lay hands on the muse their entire lives, but the drive to do so makes them chase it down until the dying day. Like a song, a pretty, seductive song, played in a house so big that it's nigh impossible to hear where it's coming from. The muse's song, the call to artists to find it, track it down, reciprocate the serenade. I found that muse. I sat down beside it and we played duets until our fingers were sore, callous and bleeding. We became dear friends, unable and unwilling to part, too enticed by the joys of pleasing one another in the flirty, nonsensical way new loves are apt to do. The muse and I, we were do enthralled with one another I was prepared to take the next step - we were going to move in together, living in a clock tower, taking pictures of pretty girls and making measly income with our sloppy love making in the arts. It was a perfect plan. It was a perfect relationship. It was too good to be true. It was too good to last.

One day I fell. I stumbled like a brazen fool, and then I fell asleep. And when I woke up, I could not hear the music anymore. The house was hollow, it gave off the uncomfortably empty silence of a forgotten memory. I looked for the muse, my dear, my love, but the muse no longer wanted to be found. I even found the piano, the music maker, where we hypnotized one another with our songs. But the muse was not there. Only me, quietly sitting at the piano, tired, alone, lost. So want of a memory, I played the piano. A new, somber song. It began with the deep, low notes of disappointment, disaster, regret and loss. The notes were so low and so deep I could have fallen into them and heard their tone forever. Then my fingers traversed the keys, ventured up the scale if for no other reason than to not be trapped by those tempting low notes. A different tone, higher, less weighty and thick, notes through which it was easier to breathe. I took to humming along to the sound, conjuring the tune from the prior emptiness I felt obliged to reserve for the muse should it return. Without my conscious action, that emptiness was filling up. Not with the muse, not with the otherworldly motivation and drive I felt deprived of. It was something else, something as yet not defined. My playing grew louder, filling the house with rich sound, a sonic wonder to hear such jollity erupt from my yet weathered husk of a self. My humming became quiet words, and my quiet words became song - "Don't be sad that it's over, be happy because it happened."

And I could swear I heard someone walking just outside the room, looking for where from the sound was coming..