Muse

It wasn't about her, after all - she was a very new friend then - but it could have been, with only a few minor changes. Even though it wasn't about her, she was there in every line. After all, isn't that how a muse works?

Something about that word he had never noticed. us, within me. Not sure what that means, if anything, but it is interesting to notice.

She had been his muse, until she wasn't, when prose turned to poetry. Or rather, she had been his prose muse, until a poetry muse beckoned. The old muse remained a new friend, and over time became his new old friend.

And history repeats, albeit with more than minor changes and not quite the same plot line, all things revisited and reconsidered. But still.

He wondered if she knew this, if she saw the parallels. He knew that in this version of that night, he might have read more into it than was there, that one muse's wholesomeness was another man's Jimmy Carter moment. To be fair to him, though, in this parallel that moment was not so much a current one as part of the what-ifs and coulda-beens that needed to be explored to let them go, at least for him.

He wondered if she knew, all things reconsidered, that it was still fear that led him out the door instead of back up the stairs. But not the same fear. This time, it wasn't fear of rejection or fear of the unknown, but fear of loss. As much as prose would always be some part of him, his heart belonged to poetry now and always would.

As he watched from a distance and chatted with his new old friend through the tin cans connected by the red thread, he wondered. Mused, even, whether she realized that the small group that stood outside the door waiting for it to open consisted mostly of those who either would never walk up those stairs or those who should never walk up those stairs.

And that they might be blocking the way - obscuring the door from view even - to those who could and should walk up those stairs.

As he left her to ponder this for a moment, glad to see that he could still write prose that flowed even if it was cryptic as fuck, he mused that he ought to write a poem next.