#musing on muses

I have been a borderline obsessive Animorphs fan since around the time that book 2 came out. One of the very few non-traumatic memories I have prior to the accident that scrambled my memory is seeing the Scholastics Book Fair Flyer and instantly being enamored with the cover of a girl changing into a cat.

I had no idea I was about to jump headlong into a nearly 30 year (so far) love of child soldiers, guerilla warfare, and trauma as far as the eye can see.

I have a lot of feelings about those "teenagers with a deathwish" (twelve. someone calculated it out in a post I've long since lost and they're twelve at the start). I have a lot of thoughts about all of the characters but Marco and Jake have consumed my attention the most. Those are my boys. The boy general and his right hand. The tactician and his guiding light.

I have roleplayed as Marco for just about twenty years now. Jake hits twelve years this month, if I go by the old blog's first post. And this week I plan on writing about one or the other or the two of them together every day.

In going down the proverbial rabbit hole that is eight (!) years of my own Tumblr posts last night, I came across quite a few true writing posts I penned.  So much of them about desire.  In the absence of love and experience, I clung to this imagination, a vision, a burning desire that spelled the words in a fury.

In intermittent texting with one of my closest friends who knows my brain well, I mentioned how much writing I did in the past, and it was decent.  I jokingly mused that perhaps I need a muse.  And she “waggled her eyebrows agreeing” on this.  (I feel like there is a lot to unpack there: Was my partner for six years not enough of a muse?  Was he never worthy enough?  Do I need a current distraction of sorts to restore myself?  Do I need to return to a frame of mind I was missing for quite a bit of time?  But that is perhaps for another post.).

Today, while talking to my other two favorite brain partners, we talked about writing; and the topic of muses arose here, too.  (This is not entirely surprising as we met at our college literary magazine gatherings.).  One of my friends said something interesting about how so many muses throughout history were not the lovers or spouses of the artists but someone outside that realm.  And this saddened me to an extent.  Why wouldn’t the person you are choosing to spend (any part of) your life with be inspiring you to be expressive in your favorite ways?  Is there a humdrum routine that removes the original desire?  Is the expression of love in new ways replacing the need/desire to express with pen and paper?  If the latter, I somewhat understand.  Who wants to document and describe when living the loving is most important for a fulfilling life.  But I am not sure.

If you are a writer, for example, and you cease or slow down your writing when you are in a relationship with someone, are you not losing an integral part of yourself?  Look, it is a HUGE challenge to write about love.  I have tried many times on these digital pages, and nearly everything falls short, a cheap attempt at capturing something, a sham of your real experience if you can’t word it just right.  Very few people have been able to produce genuine love poems or expressions in prose.  (And then, of course, I tossed out that a true love poem has not been written since the 1600s because that’s when John Donne’s The Sun Rising emerged, and it is the only love poem worth reading.  Which I am only a tiny bit kidding about, because, good lord, that one gets me every time.)

The question is, what characters should this blog feature for RPs. And the only real, proper, true answer is ‘what do I want to write’. Unfortunately, this answer goes from ‘everyone’ to ‘nothing at all’ to ‘here’s a rotating notated list ordered in vague priorities and impulses, which also changes in the space between infinities’.

So it’s probably a good idea to gather some feedback. As I said in my intro post, the six fandoms I definitely know I’d dig getting into are, in no particular order of importance: Madokas, Dangans, Kantais, Touhous, Katawas, and Personae. It can be safely said that you can request characters from any of those for RPs and it would be strongly considered, although there’s a lot of other potentials as well.

As for things I’m pondering on my own, again in no particular order.

I want to sing to you.

My heart's full of broken notes, you know the sort. Bits of noise and dissonant rhythms. It's like a song you can't catch on your lips, but you're sure you heard it on the radio sometime before, maybe when you were just little and the world seems so much more fresh and alive than it does today.

Catch your breath. Catch mine too. Catch it, and throw it back to me so I can smell your scene and remember why I thought being with you would be better than being alone, any day of the week.

Any day of the weak is a day for me. Too weak to be strong, too lame to create, too broken to build. Sand slides through the cracks in my fingers, and time leaks out the holes in my heart. Everything slips away, turns grey, fades into ashes. An ashen touch to your lips. Like a sound, a whisper, and then it's gone and you've got a shadow cast across you.

I'm here I'm here I'm here, I shout and I shout all day. 

I dunno who hears me. Maybe you do. Maybe you don't. Maybe you do and you just don't care very much. 

But it could be worse. We could be all alone forever and ever without anywhere else to be.

Then again,