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Between Cryptic Lines
Sep. 27th, 2007 01:48 pmSeveral years ago, I met someone in a writers' chatroom who also had an LJ account. At the time, new LJ members had to be sponsored, through existing accounts, and she was kind enough to do that for me. After that, we'd occasionally IM, late at night, about books, writing, life.
Then, I dunno, she moved on to other people, other things, eventually stopped writing in her journal, even. So I left one last comment that sort of echoed the style and sentiments of her final post. And that was the last thing written in her journal for a long while. But I'd often think of her and our shared fascination for bohemian Paris and the writers and artists and ex-patriots of the 1920s.
It helped to do that as life became increasingly common, everyday, predictable, and every hope, every source of inspiration, every instinct for romance, was slowly drained from me. And I never considered that it might've hurt anyone, only that it kept alive something vital to my own humanity.
Recently, she posted a few cryptic lines, indicating that she might try writing again. And I immediately thought it might be cool, establish an interesting symmetry, to have been the last and then the first to comment. So that's what I did with a few short welcoming lines that once more blended, I thought, with the voice and style and emotion of her own entry.
But it's hard to do that without at least some feeling for what may lie between the lines. And it occurred to me that what she'd written was uncharacteristically tentative and fragile. Which led me to conclude, albeit belatedly, that I might better have stayed away.
In the past, she'd inspired me, given me poetry. Became, unknowingly, my online muse. But if all that I can give her, now, is a necessary latitude, then that is what I'll do...
Then, I dunno, she moved on to other people, other things, eventually stopped writing in her journal, even. So I left one last comment that sort of echoed the style and sentiments of her final post. And that was the last thing written in her journal for a long while. But I'd often think of her and our shared fascination for bohemian Paris and the writers and artists and ex-patriots of the 1920s.
It helped to do that as life became increasingly common, everyday, predictable, and every hope, every source of inspiration, every instinct for romance, was slowly drained from me. And I never considered that it might've hurt anyone, only that it kept alive something vital to my own humanity.
Recently, she posted a few cryptic lines, indicating that she might try writing again. And I immediately thought it might be cool, establish an interesting symmetry, to have been the last and then the first to comment. So that's what I did with a few short welcoming lines that once more blended, I thought, with the voice and style and emotion of her own entry.
But it's hard to do that without at least some feeling for what may lie between the lines. And it occurred to me that what she'd written was uncharacteristically tentative and fragile. Which led me to conclude, albeit belatedly, that I might better have stayed away.
In the past, she'd inspired me, given me poetry. Became, unknowingly, my online muse. But if all that I can give her, now, is a necessary latitude, then that is what I'll do...
