“…and all the while I was one busted rubber away from being the Queen of someone’s double-wide trailer with 3 screaming kids, no future and no hope.”
“What made you wake up?”
“I looked in the mirror one day when I was 19 years old and saw an old woman. I was wearing someone else’s clothes and living someone else’s life. The next evening, I put on a black bra and went to a Lesbian bar. I came home at 4 o’clock the next morning a different woman.”
There comes a time when there is nothing more to say, when the days of waiting by the window for the flaming-haired muse to come traipsing up the dirt path to your home are too long, too sad, and too wasteful when there are so many other practical things waiting to be done.
So we wash and scrub, we write checks and do figures, we talk on phones and through keyboards, and still the muse, she does not come.
We watch as the orbit of our world makes one final slow rotation before finally coming to a rest at our feet, without fanfare or tears, but merely a deafening silence. Our fingers reach out to grasp the rails, hoping to feel the warmth of a recently departed soul but there is nothing but the icy coolness under our outstretched tips. Evidence that the vacancy has stretched like sinew through the fall and into the winter before finally snapping with a powdery rip.