Silent Muse

I'm not writing.  Not anything.  Not even bad things.  The stories I have begun are all waiting for work.  The few fragments of ideas I have for poetry waste away like fruit that came too early to the vine, received too little rain to grow.  I feel hollowed out.

I keep telling myself that it's a season, that it's just the remnants of an incredibly stressful school year lingering, but what if it's not?  What if there is nothing left to say?  What if my little vein of talent, never great at the best of times, is tapped out and gone for good?  What if the Muse has folded her wings over her face and turned away?

Last year was so MUCH.  There was so much turmoil, so much pain, so many days where I came home and quite literally fell down on my couch unable to do more than take in some form of food before I became unconscious.  There were so many tears, angry ones, frustrated ones, desperate ones, futile ones....  Maybe I burned something vital inside me out, blew a fuse of some kind that I need now.

I'm so afraid that I know what part of the problem is.  I only write really well when I'm in love.  It doesn't have to be love with a person; I can be in love with the place I'm travelling through, in love with the thing I'm doing, in love with the new thing I'm seeing or experiencing.  I write best, I think, when there is also that great engine of love for somebody driving me, but right now, that is so frustratingly not possible.  Instead, there are only the things that I do not want under any circumstances, the things that I know I cannot have, and the things that mock me from the past.  Instead, there is only this vast unbroken winter that continues to expand inside me, everything still, everything cold and waiting.

And I hate it.  I was not made for cold.  I was not made for winter.  I was not made for this emptiness.  I was made to pour my love and wonder through a pen, though the keys before me, to try to share what the glory of the world looks like to me, even if I don't do it very well, just as a way of offering gratitude for the gift of the vision.  This perverse dullness, this sense of beauty that hovers at the edge of my vision but disappears when I go searching for it, makes me feel like I've been exiled because of an offense.  I have my fingers wrapped around the gate, peering in, but I somehow lost the key for the lock....

If running out and jumping into some stupid fling was the cure, I guess I would try it, but I know myself well enough to know that shallow does not work for me.  I am not one who "flings" although, I suppose, I have been "flung" once unintentionally on my own part....  I lack the temperament to run out and just "fall in love" for the hell of it.  I can't set up some unsuspecting guy to be my own personal "Laura" and sonnet him to death.  Either I really have to feel it, or it can't be forced or forged.  I wish I could lie to myself, comfort myself by putting a clever mask on something that I knew was lacking, temporary, and flawed, and dancing it around for awhile just for the sake of having some relief, a little Spring, but I've never been able to pull that particular Fool's Dance off.

Maybe if I can just get out on some trips, some of the ice inside me will start to break up.  Maybe I'll see things through the lens that will inspire the nib.  I'm starting to be afraid, so very, very afraid, that it is permanent.  I don't know what to do with myself if I become that frozen ice floe version of myself.  I don't think I can stand that.  And I know there won't be any help forthcoming from outside sources to help me attack the encroaching ice, so this is yet another problem that I'll have to deal with myself.