Up with the Muse

12/6/20250

Dear ————-,

Something got me out of bed tonight. It might’ve been the muse. It might’ve been the sentences annoying me to be written down. Also it was my empty stomach and sore throat . . . and the realization that getting out of bed while my family slept would be my only solitude for the foreseeable future and so the urge to take it while I could get it was irresistible.

I went downstairs, turned on the Christmas lights, lit the incense, put on a record, made myself a cider and wrote down a meager page of random thoughts that had seemed very important while I was laying in bed. I’d been very comfortable but I just had to get up, so here I am.

The Muse is the most interesting reason to be awake, of course. I like to think I have one, or even several. Why else would you get up and stay up and keep your pen moving? Praying that whatever was playing at the edge of your mind would show up? Willing it with ink to come to the page and tell you its secrets?

Possibly the only secret is that I was thinking of you, as I often am, and felt I needed to confirm it in writing.

I feel like telling you that my life is a semi-contained mess, that I am both the most grateful and most regretful I’ve ever been. I’ve never really had regrets - I tend to think of life and myself more kindly, but this one is here to stay. I won’t burden you with specifics, except to say that the grief of a true regret is new to me. I can’t explain it away or find a silver lining, though it is beautiful and that, lately, is the Muse.

Because, somehow, this regret also lights up the love, the almost silver linings that I can logically appreciate but that will never satisfy. That exquisite ache is its own beauty. And the words that come to me when I am sad are beautiful, even if I never have a chance to speak them, even if they don’t change a thing.

Maybe regret is pointless, but I can’t force it away or ignore it. The only thing that helps at all is to write down whatever it tells me and to hope that someday it gets “better”. On the other hand, I want to keep feeling it deeply because it keeps the alternate reality of “what if it had gone differently” clear in my mind and warm in my heart.

Maybe there’s another way to deal with it I can’t see right now. Maybe that’s why I’m writing to you (at 2am on a Saturday in my bathrobe on the couch.)

Anyway, how are you? Tell me something awful and sad, let’s not pretend that we always see the positive. Something in me wants to bleed, and I feel like . . . maybe you do too?

Or, you can tell me something happy. Tell me anything at all. It’s what I’ve been hoping for - not to hear my own voice in this ink, but yours.

What would you tell me?

xx,

m

ps - Goodnight now. My eyes are drooping, the Muse seems to have spoken, the record is over, it’s time for bed and I’m annoyed that I have to brush my teeth again, but the snowplow just went by and i peeked out from behind the Christmas tree to watch it and I felt like a little kid, alone in house, it was very cozy.

pps - the next day after I wrote this letter in my journal, my husband and sister both told me some really awful sad stuff, and you know . . . sometimes I feel like these letters are premonitions which makes me sometimes scared to even write them down. But after we talked we felt better. I’ll probably write about it.

Poles Apart - Pink Floyd

Did you know it was all going to go so wrong for you?
And did you see? It was all going to be so right for me?
Why did we tell you then
You were always the golden boy then
And that you'd never lose that light in your eyes?

Hey you, did you ever realize what you'd become?
And did you see that it wasn't only me, you were running from?
Did you know all the time but it never bothered you anyway?
Leading the blind while I stared out the steel in your eyes

The rain fell slow, down on all the roofs of uncertainty
I thought of you and the years and all the sadness fell away from me
And did you know?
I never thought that you'd lose that light in your eyes