The Musician

Music emanates from you like heat from a sidewalk in July. It's curious and brilliant to watch, wanting so much to understand the process, but wanting more to uphold its mystery. If you were a walk you would be a swagger, aloof and seductive. I scamper quickly behind, sheepishly dodging in and out of alleys, hopelessly catching up from a distance. I am the hurried two-step beside you, the small feet of a child keeping up with a father's giant strides. I know nothing of myself anymore, though I know that what I am is incomplete. Your gaze is abstract, preoccupied. Oftentimes I wonder if you have every really seen me, even though I know you're the only one who possibly could. 

If your world were a library, I'd tell you I lost my library card, then would sneak inside when you looked away. I would spend hours as a clandestine observer; shelving and unshelving volumes of you, devouring your thoughts, the flash of your smile, your dreams. I'd become an expert on the way you take your coffee. You walk and I follow intrigued, gathering the music notes that you leave behind in your footsteps.

When the feeling comes to me, it’s fierce and exacting—it moves crowds to get to me. I try to push it back, but it’s aggressive, forcing my pen to the paper; I must get black on white. When it comes, it bursts through me like a fist through glass, smashing me to tiny bits. I only let the moment overtake me fleetingly, any more than that would make it real. I am an expert on its truth. 

The aftershocks are lasting though and that’s what really slays me. The feeling you give me resonates, a low bellow through the cavern of my body, vibrating my limbs. I feel it for hours. 

You have become the muse I thought I lost though, showing up unexpectedly, unsolicited. A word from you renders me cleverless and fills my face with sudden red. At that moment I am a single silly stroke upon a blank canvas, a dandelion among roses. 

I am knocked to the cement and remain there, breathless. You have facilitated the unbecoming of me.