Word After Word

  

My amusing friend Amelia (age 5) is a great metaphor. She’s a muse. She comes by a lot. She’s hard to resist. When I open the front door, she’s beaming, in her little pink pixie coat, hood on. She says, throwing out her arms, “This is the favorite moment of my day.”

 

She comes by  a lot. I’m always happy to see her. Sometimes I am having a stressful

Orlando situation, a long phone call. Sunday, I was drawing a bath. I showed her the water. I wrote out a note. Come back Monday after 6:35 P M. She ran home happy.

 

Monday I had to work late. I knew about the muse, but I was hoping she would forget. She’s five. I had to work! My grade averaging program had a glitch—I was stressing about mathematics. The complexity of my system—why couldn’t it be simple? If a five was an A, what was an F, a 1? Was this right and true and good? What was a Zero? A G? Why couldn’t I be like a normal teacher and give a midterm, a final. I was pecked at by numbers and pecked at by decimals. It took hours, it took assistance. I wept.

 

When I got home, I poured a glass of wine and started the bath and got the mail. There was only my post-it, stuck to a large yellow sheet of paper, which read, in the hand of a madman or small child, with backwards letters, large red marker letters, the lines listing to the right like planes falling out of the sky:

 

HEATHER I ALREADY CAME TO YOUR HOUSE LOVE AMELIA

 

It was yellow like a citation, large as a judgment, pointed as an apology. It was a call to arms, a manifesto, a William Carlos Williams poem, a threat, a break-up, a crack-up, a point, an accusation, and, also, simple and informative and direct, as adults never are. 

 

It was the “already” that I loved, that broke my heart.

 

With my note attached!  Come back Monday after 6:35 P M.  

I’d invited her in writing. Because she’s five, I blew her off. 

It was after nine o’clock. When the door bell rang, I was stepping into the tub. It rang again. I knew who it was. I got dressed. And went to her. “Sweetie,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”  

This is what we do. We tell the writing life how much we love it. We tell everyone we love it, love it, love it, want it. We say if we had more time! We make promises. We beg for the muse. Then, when she comes, we blow her off. We think she won’t notice. She’ll forget. She’s busy with her own friends, people her own age. We do this again and again to the muse. Because we convince ourselves so easily we’re not that important, she’s not that important. Because she’s the muse, and like a five year old, but also invisible (who will know?) we blow her off. 

She’s already come to your house.

 

“Dear Writer, I’ve already come to your house. Love Muse.”