Writing, the Perfect Lover

Writing is the perfect lover for me.

She is magical, both ever present and invisible. And so no one can ever lure her away from me.

I confess I have not been the perfect lover in return, often I have asked her to do things for others she may not want to do at all. Yet she has never complained to me, never refused to author, and she has never left me. She is inexhaustible, nonjudgmental, and compassionate. At times like dawn or twilight she nearly always visits me, if I am in the mood. When I don’t have time for her she takes no offense but quietly recedes, infinitely patient.

Yes, writing is a mystery. And like a perfect love, she does not age. She has always been with me. She was here when I began to think and speak and she is here each night in sleep. She knows me intimately and there is no thought of mine she has declined to share. Nothing is too horrible for her, nothing to painful, nothing too unfair. No experiment for her is too bizarre, no suggestion rejected.  She’s ever waiting in the recesses of my mind and I’m sure she’s busy there, if not completely happy at least engaged in something to share another day.

Each time the intellectual demands of my life cease momentarily, waiting on the train, ironing, sleeping, there she reappears unbidden. I never have to ask. She transcends time, place, boundaries, inadequacies. She becomes whatever is her fancy when we are together. And if our time alone together is long enough, she takes me to places I’ve never been. She has no distain for truth, but no attachment to it either, as she is clothed in fiction.

She takes the twists and turns of life experience and crafts them into something we call story. There she allows me to relive events with a new perspective, and with the release of a full resolution. To any crime, she can bring retribution, to any longing, fulfillment, to any problem a solution.

And so I love writing. If I do not love her, who will? If she does not visit me who will she visit?