Photo by Jennifer Long.
When you fall in love with a writer you fall in love with a kaleidoscope of creativity; a different view point on the world. You fall in love with a being that yearns experience and longs for the next encounter. Always longing. Submissive to the chains of melancholy, the writer will never be satisfied by the mundane. The ordinary will never be sufficient. The writer needs the hustle and bustle of the busy cities, the overpowering silences of the country, the mediocrity of the inbetweens, the tiny towns overlapped by stretches of fields. When you fall in love with a writer you fall in love with days of grey when the mind is blank and dull.
You learn what the absence of lust for words and the lack of rhythm at the end of their fingertips does. The writer’s block induced grumpiness and the frustrations only a fellow writer can empathise with. There is nothing as infuriating as words swimming in your mind and not on a page – it is a heartbreak writers suffer many times. When you fall in love with a writer, you fall in love with extremity. Nothing is how it was. Writers are a whirlwind of superlatives. The bad will become the worst and the good will be woven into the best. Every emotion is the highest felt emotion, every experience tops the next and nothing is everything.
You fall in love with the passion. The sleepy stillness resting in their eyes when you awake for work and they are a blur of coffee and junk food, staring sullenly at computer screen half full of words. The vacant expression and the vague murmurs of recognition as everything you’ve just said goes in one ear and out the other. The empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s discarded around the apartment because Ernest Hemmingway’s advice proves true. Well, sometimes. The beauty they can create with 26 letters and the feelings they can evoke with simple words. The way they can break your heart and heal it again, daily.
The way we fall in love with writers is beautiful.
But when a writer falls in love with you, your habits that were once quirky become familiarities. They will never go unnoticed. Every time you play with your own hair and turn your head to the left and smile with the right side of your mouth, the writer will notice. And they will notice every time your hands find each other in a nervous panic and entwine themselves. The writer will retain all the bullet points of your persona and you will be their midnight passages. Applying you to their sentences to write you as adequately as you are will be a life sentence – to make others see you how the writer does through those 26 letters. The writer will fall in love with the meaning behind the colour of your eyes. The way they get lighter as you get closer to slumber will entrance them, mesmorise them, inspire them.
To a writer, you are a bottle of whiskey. The writer will tally all these things and they will study them as they study you, enveloping all your regularities in similes, picking out delicate metaphors to suit the way you mumble in your sleep. There will not be enough words the writer can use to describe your smile, but they will try. They will fall in love with you the way people fall asleep. They will laze in the dozy haze of slipping into sub-consciousness, or falling in love. And then they will fall in love all at once and be utterly and entirely besotted with you, and all of your attributes that contribute to what makes you, you. A writer will fall in love with every precise detail of you, and they will immortalise you in ink. The typing of a keyboard or the scratching of a pen becomes a heartbeat, a lifeline, a support system, until every aspect that is loved about you is recorded.
When a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.
Written by Leia Jade.
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