Everybody Wants Love

What is it about Southern Gothic?  The characters are all tortured souls.  It is my belief that most Southern authors are tortured souls as well.  And that an author can't write well about a place until he leaves it.  It's like unrequited love.  There's some nagging itch of a feeling that must be put on paper or a memory stick.  That need to write.

I had a need to write.  I had several stories that I longed to tell.  Coming of age tales, stories of love and loss, yarns of deceit and redemption.  For a while, I couldn't go a day without writing.  Hours would disappear as if mere seconds as the words flowed onto the pages.  But then something happened.

My muse, that itch to write, vanished overnight.  She had been my constant for several years.  But suddenly she was gone.  And the strange thing is that I don't miss her. 

Her leaving coincided with the culmination of a class that Mr. Gaelic and I took.  Oddly enough, it was only in learning how to truly communicate everything we needed and wanted of each other that I no longer needed an expressive outlet. 

Mr. Gaelic might not appreciate my candor, but we spent almost a year with a coach doing individual and joint homework assignments in learning why and how we react to each other based on our life experiences.  The homework and classwork was emotionally difficult at times.  But in learning how to express ourselves in a manner that the other was receptive to, we learned that we had never really opened up to each other.  Twenty years of marriage and we finally learned how to talk to each other so that the other person actually heard, not only with their ears but with their heart, what we had to say.

When you know without a shadow of a doubt that you are heard by the person you love more than life itself, finding a replacement muse is moot. 

[Title taken from this.]