Afflatus..

And, in that world of constant motion and commotion, where the ordinary tends to overwhelm the remarkable, here she was: a woman who seemed to emerge from the humdrum of everyday life, conjured from somewhere beyond the fray of the fog of living; not someone who had arrived with fanfare or pomp, but someone whose arrival had been like the insidious, nearly imperceptible tilt of the seasons; a tilt you notice only after you stop to look. And, it was this tilt that slyly shifted my world so radically, in such a subtle way, that even in my most farfetched imaginations I had never predicted it would.

It was not only her, but rather something in her, which had come to meet me, and which had gone on working its way into me, as though upon a string, struck and vibrating. I felt as though a chord had been touched in me, which had been struck the very first time I laid eyes on her. I felt drawn to her, not with that idle and detached curiosity with which one regards any stranger whom one meets, but with that desire to find what is rare and precious, with which one approaches a newly discovered treasure. There was something about her, some sort of power that was almost imperceptible, but which held me fixed, drew me to her, and yet restrained me at the same time.

The first thing I noticed was her voice. It wasn’t simply what she said, though what she said was always interesting and often arresting. No, it was the rhythm of it all, the way it sounded as if every word had been culled and polished and then released into the world with an equal amount of attention and acumen. There was something musical about her voice, a tempo that was both calming and stimulating, utterly lulling yet also bracing, like a carefully composed symphony you find yourself lulled into, only to emerge from it having been changed in ways not easily named. It was the kind of voice, that is, that you listen to not just for what she had to say, but for what she wasn’t saying: for what happened in the pauses, and the silence that followed them, silence that seemed full of meaning.

I watched with fondness as she spoke, absently tying her hair into a knot. There was something gentle in the way she did this, a grace to the whole action. It was as if her fingers were mimicking the way she went about life itself: smooth and easy, with a poise that could conceal the turbulence within. There was such a delicacy to the way the strands were wound, a small act that seemed to contain all of her, put on display for anyone who cared to look. She was understated yet considered; refined yet entangled in the realm of the material.

But it was her eyes that kept me hooked and dazzled, two deep pools reflecting the light and the dark of a complex inner life. Lit by the low light of the bar, they seemed to flicker with intensity: seductive and blustering. The type of eyes that made you feel seen; really, truly seen in that disarming and somewhat comforting way. The kind of eyes that seemed to look right through you, right into the middle of you, past your protective layers and into your very heart, whatever or whoever you might be. And in those eyes was something more: an undercurrent of concealed feeling, a vulnerability wrapped in layers of intelligence and poise.

I recall the way the wind blew her hair around her face when we went outdoors, its strands flying towards her as though magnetically drawn to her like a natural force. There was an element of poetry to the way the natural world appeared to respond to her presence, as though it recognised in her a fellow human imbued with the same inherent rhythms of the earth. Those quiet, intimate, almost sacred moments were the times I felt most in touch with her, as if it was the universe itself conspiring to create something special: something worth experiencing and something worth writing about.

And, each time I met her I felt enriched by the experience, as if, somehow, she had managed to have planted a seed or two in my fertile mind, for them to grow and bloom and flower, ideas that I never would have had on my own. She did not so much inspire me as bring something alive inside me, something long dormant, that needed a spark to be set alight.

She made me talk, and suddenly my mind was full of words, and I began to write them in so many words that I could hardly contain her in them. She was the paradox of womanhood: a cause of hope as she emptied my glass, and disappointment as beginning to refill it, she topped it once more. And yet, my glass was perpetually half-empty. She is a complex object, because I find her simple. In short, she is a paradox and an enigma to me, and it is thus that she serves as my muse. A woman who is everything at once and its opposite.

The world as it is: broken, disorderly, sometimes depressing would often prompt a response from her that was as searing as it was intuitive. She was opinionated: words that cut to the chase, that pointed with clarity at the heart of things, and rarely missed their mark. Yet even in her frustration, she could find hope, could see a way forward, even in the most apparently hopeless, stuck situations, as though she had some mysterious capacity to see beyond the obvious, to the possibilities present even in the apparent impossibilities all around. She had a gift for filling with hope, with light, the dark spaces that others left empty.

And, several times I found myself rendered dumb by her arguments: messages in which her logic was so ironclad that all I could do was nod in agreement and submit to the inevitability of her conclusions. There was always something else, something deeper than reason, something more primitive than rationality, that moved her. At the core, beyond all the layers of logical justification, remained an emotion, a passion that she fought hard to keep latent, alive only in the momentary flash of her eyes, or the tremulous quaver of her voice, at moments of verbal refuge, when she spoke of matters that really mattered, that she really cared about. This is what fascinated me, this tallying of forces, the dialectic between darkness and light, despair and hope.

In her, I found not only a muse, but a mirror, the ego ideal, the return of the repressed: the unresolved questions and tensions of my own psychic economy. She was a riddle I could never quite solve. And the point, perhaps, was that I could never quite solve her. Pursuing her, I pursued myself. When I tried to describe her, I found my own voice again: muffled for so long by the chatter, commerce, carping of everyday life.

No matter how she is, no matter how she copes with this world going haywire, she still lives on in my mind, sparking my imagination, and inspiring my muse that gives songs their cadence, and breath to words; and so long as she is allowed to live on, even if I may likely never know who she is, I know I won’t mind, for she is now a part of me.

Ultimately, she is not a muse but a spirit of place, a natural force, a reminder that beauty is paradox, hope resides in the margins, and the richest stories are the ones that can’t be told. She is the source of every syllable humming in my head, the wellspring I draw from with every sentence, every line. And without her, I would have no words at all.

In her, I have found someone who is not only an inspiration but also a travelling companion on the road to the self, a troubadour who leads me deeper into the labyrinth of my own mind, whose shadows hold the deepest truths. She is a light in the dark, a reminder that a path provides perspective even in the most complicated and contradictory of situations that tumult remains a source of generative potential, that life never really ends, and that as long as she remains my tale, I will always find a way to keep on telling it.

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