LH#25: The Muse, Pt. 2
(OMG was there a Pt. 1?)
Last thing I said to her in person: “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The goodbye, pt. 2:
I had a long run where I got very good at falling out of touch with people. It is surprisingly easy to do — you let a few years go by, your friends get married, leave town, have kids, the correspondence dies out. You forget birthdays, phone numbers, the kind of car they drive. You lose some of the things they gave you, or photos of them that you used to keep around the house.
At a certain point, after you can’t remember the last time you saw them, you stop missing them. Then a few more people might fade away, and things get lonelier. Empty places start to become havens.
Back in the fall, the muse was telling me that I needed to go back and find these people I had lost. “They won’t turn you away,” she assured me. I guess I knew that already, but I needed someone to say it out loud to me. I needed that little shove. (The hug was nice too.)
There was a time when I used to travel a lot more — planning trips with roommates and borrowing beat-up copies of Lonely Planet this or that. I haven’t looked at one in a while, but in the older editions, you could always find the same line at the bottom of the last page: “All you’ve got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over. So go!”
I can hear her in that motto. The hardest part is over. Go. You can’t come up with excuses when someone talks to you like that. It forces you to do something — break a habit, regroup, rethink, act.
But here is the thing. What if she is the habit? What if she has become the hardest part?
She warned me a couple times what I would need to do. It didn’t seem right to me then. And now, as I go through with it, it still doesn’t feel right.
