My muse

~a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist

Sometimes I feel like I’m incapable of feelings anymore. I have repressed my emotions to such an extent that I am completely numb now. It’s as if love was once a home to me, and now it has shut me out, leaving me standing outside without the key.

I cannot love the way I once did. Out of touch with myself, my identity slips away, and I realise I have slowly become a person I once hated.

I used to be a hopeless romantic. That is how I lived my life. I somehow found love in almost everything, but over time my gaze shifted. Now even when I search the nooks and crannies, I cannot seem to find that old version of me — the one who never doubted the power of love, the one who once loved wholeheartedly.

Yet strangely, even now, there is still someone who crosses my mind more frequently than anyone else. I think of myself as the most self-indulgent soul I know, for my thoughts most often concern only me. Yet if there is someone who appears in those thoughts again and again, it is certainly him.

All my life, the poems I have written have circled only a handful of emotions — my perpetual existential crises, the abstract imagery I hide behind to appear profound, my flawed relationships. But most of all, I write about someone.

We’ll call him my muse.

There are months when I do not write at all. I sit with blank pages and force myself to begin, only to stop after a few lines. My greatest fear is writer’s block—that if I go too long without writing, my mind will forget how to create something worthwhile. In those stretches of silence, I convince myself I have exhausted every thought I ever had. That I have already written everything there was to write.

And then one phone call from him, and I am inspired again. Sometimes the call comes in the middle of the night but I always answer.

He tells me about a new song he’s writing. His excitement spills through the phone—the kind that reminds you of a toddler tasting ice cream for the first time. And I cannot help but smile. He says he’s happy after such a long time, and just hearing that makes me forget everything else. But when he looks at me, through the screen of the phone, I look away so he cannot see how my heart softens. All those emotions I thought had left me, never to return, begin to rush back again.

The walls I built around myself start to bend. An old ache stirs.

He explains the meaning behind every line of the song, and for a moment I forget how I ever doubted the power of love.

But just as I’m about to say something, he mentions another girl—the one he wrote the song for. And suddenly I remember.

I could never be his muse.

Ironically, all he could ever be to me was exactly that—my muse.

I am an intense person. I feel everything with a sharpness that is almost unbearable, and in moments like those the only thing that makes sense is to write it down. The love—or perhaps the passion—I felt for him was too overwhelming to hold inside. Life never gave me the chance to offer it to him directly, so I poured it elsewhere.

I translated it into ink.

There was a time when I thought this was an ailment. I wanted to escape it. I told myself I was done writing about him, done dedicating my life’s work to someone who probably never cared. But now I have come to terms with something I once resisted.

He is my muse.

And that is all he should ever remain.

Maybe one day I will love someone else again, for I know I still have it inside me. But I also know it will never come as easily as loving him did.

And when he calls me again at midnight to tell me he finished the song, I will wake up just to listen. When he becomes famous and fills stadiums, I will still be there in the crowd, shouting his name louder than anyone else. I will remember every lyric he ever wrote, and somewhere deep inside I will secretly hope that one of them was meant for me. And while he writes songs for the world, I will continue writing for him.

Because he was never mine.

Only my muse.