Inspire (3 page)

What happens after that? I don’t know. I’ve never really let it get that far. But I’ve seen it. Roughly a thousand years ago, in the period history now calls the Dark Ages. It’s named such for the lack of historical records from the period, but for me the name fits in better ways. We were all still together then, my sisters and I. There were nine of us, all muses, each with our own purposes and specialties. By the end of that century, we would all go our separate ways, scattered across the globe, but it would only be eight of us.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been singing softly to myself when I draw myself back to the present, away from lives past, but a handful of people at nearby benches and trees are watching me, slightly dazed. I clamp my mouth shut, but they continue to stare.

As muses, we have as much of an aptitude for the arts as we do for inspiring them. But it’s an unspoken rule that we don’t seek to create anything ourselves. It’s hard enough to hide among humans and do what we do without being able to change our appearances. Any kind of notoriety threatens our ability to conceal ourselves and live in the world. There’s a reason I’m trolling a college campus rather than finding my next relationship in Hollywood or New York or Paris. I find my artists when they’re still finding themselves. It’s better for me that way, feels like I’m actually making a difference and helping them. There’s also no fame involved (not yet anyway), so I don’t risk getting photographed or noticed or otherwise exposed. 

I need the world, need the people in it. Muses can’t survive without it. We can only expend our energy with mortals, otherwise we would have withdrawn with the rest of the gods. And they might have left us here, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t watching. Doesn’t mean they won’t intervene if one of us jeopardizes the rest.

They’ve done it before. And they won’t hesitate to cut us down to seven if they must.

I gather my belongings and decide to skip my next class in favor of checking out the offerings of the music library (the people, not the music). On my way, I catch sight of the flashing red and white lights of an ambulance by the on-campus apartments between here and the fine arts buildings. I’m heading that way anyway, so I cross that direction until I get to the group of students standing, blocking the sidewalk and waiting.

I nudge a bigger guy next to me as he texts rapidly on his cell.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

It’s the curvy redhead on my right that answers. “Suicide.”

“Attempted,” the Hispanic guy next to her corrects.

“I don’t know. I have a friend who lives in the building, and she said he hung himself.”

“Pills,” the guy with the phone finally answers. “I know the guy who found him. It was pills.”

At that moment, the front door opens, and they wheel out a stretcher. One paramedic is rolling it toward the ambulance. The other has one of those respirator things fitted over the guy’s mouth, and is squeezing it periodically. The crowd begins to shift and whisper, pushing forward in morbid curiosity as the stretcher arrives at the ambulance. They lift the patient up, high enough that I’ve got a clear view, and for all my thoughts about time being a constant, I swear it slows to a stop then.

Because I recognize the dark, shaggy hair. The shape of the face. Even with that oxygen thing over his nose and mouth, and his unusually pale skin, I know with a bone deep certainty that it’s Van.

My Van.

I’ve seen his face in the brightness of day, scruffy from not shaving, and clean and smooth. I’ve seen him in the low light of his room, sleeping and awake. I’ve seen him in the glow of his laptop as he sat up late at night tapping away at the keys while I tried to sleep.

I know him.

Maybe he didn’t know me, and maybe he was just a means to an end, and maybe I was that for him, too. But all the same …

I know him
.

My breath catches in the back of my throat, halfway between my lungs and the open air, and for a moment I can’t get myself to push it out or pull it in. My vision begins to narrow, a lens zeroing in until everything else disappears but the boy being loaded into the ambulance.

This is my fault.

If I hadn’t influenced him one last time to get him to go away … If I’d never smiled back at him in that bar six months before that … If Van Noffke had never met me, he wouldn’t be on that stretcher.

I stumble back away from the crowd. I try to walk slowly, calmly. But I just can’t. I put one foot in front of the other, faster and faster, until I’m running. My heart seems to twist between every beat, and I’m just waiting …
waiting
for it to twist so hard it tears loose.

And somewhere along the way, the image of Van on that stretcher blurs with the wild energy I can feel pumping through my body, mingling with my blood, the energy grappling for release. And I’m no longer sure whether I’m running from what I saw or who I
am
.

Maybe those two things aren’t really that different.

Creation and Destruction.

These are the things I inspire.

Six days later, I stop going to class. I wake up in bed, and it just doesn’t even occur to me to go. There’s so much energy still trapped in me because I haven’t been able to bring myself to do anything about it, to expel it, not after seeing Van.

And I’m just so full, I can’t think beyond the way it feels. There’s a world inside my head, and it’s so easy,
too easy
, to vacate my real life for the one in my mind.

There’s a tempest there…

Churning

Raging

      Flooding

It laps at me in waves, crashing high and then rolling away. It drags me a little farther away from myself every time, that irresistible tide.

And it’s suffocating and extraordinary and glorious. And I no longer want to push it out. I want to drown in it, in all the colors and ideas and feelings it opens up in me. The thoughts … they’re so big that they eclipse everything else. The past. The future. Emotions. They drown those out completely. For the first time in many,
many
years, I know what it feels like to not have memories shackled to my ankles, holding me back.

I pick up a pen and paper to write down how it feels to be this alive, to be this free. It’s beautiful.
Brilliant
. This must be how the other gods feel. I might not be human, but that doesn’t mean I’m free from the mortal coil. I’m just not chained to it by life and death. I’m chained by need. But not now, not anymore. I don’t need anything.

I write a single word first.

Need.

One word becomes two.

Want.

More words spill out of me then, springing to mind faster than I can write them.

hope
                  
hatred
                  
joy

fear
            
awake
      
      
freedom

laughter
      
lies
      
faith

beauty
            
wild
            
desire

purpose
                                                      
truth

change
                        
art

pain happy regret

passion
      
grace
      

strength
      
courage

shame

dream
      
life
            
wonder
      
power

sorrow
            
poison
      
peace

mercy
            
wisdom belief
            
grief
            
guilt

time

love

The words shift, become sentences. Those sentences tangle and twine into paragraphs, my ideas grow legs and they walk, run,
sprint
across the page, and I can’t stop. I write all morning, across every piece of paper I own until my desk, the drawers, my backpack are all empty. Then I write across the furniture and the floors and the walls. I write words I love and hate and feel so intensely that they bring tears to my eyes.

And the words … gods. They’re everything.

All that I am and want to be and hate to be … it’s all in them, and sometimes I sit and marvel at how a series of scribbles can mean so much, how words can hold so much meaning in the space between their measly letters.

INSPIRE.

I write the word across my living room floor in big, black letters. Then I stare at it, unsure whether I want to scratch it out or deface it or write over it.

It’s a curse, that word. A purpose I’m tired of serving.

So what if I just … quit?

I know what it will do to me. Is already doing to me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I can look around at my scribed walls and know it’s not normal. I know that I’ve let this go entirely too long, and now the power I wield is stronger than I am. It flexes in me, fierce and hungry, and for a moment, I feel a spike of fear. Then it passes in a wave of euphoria, and I know now why people find me,
what I can give them
, addictive.

It makes me feel brilliant and aware and one with everything around me, and for the first time ever, I
understand
. Not just an idea or a person or a place. I understand
everything
. The world. The past. The present. My existence.

It’s vast and complicated and I can’t put it into words, but I just
know
. For the first time in my life, I actually feel like a goddess.

I come to a decision then.

I draw a D at the end of the word I scrawled on my living room floor.

INSPIRED.

Maybe this is my curse, but I don’t have to share it. I don’t have to push it on other people.

Mortals … they’re fragile. They can die or break or ruin. And I suppose I’m not immune to those last two either, but I’m stronger than they are. And I’ve been so very selfish for so very long.

Some already mad part of me rejoices at my decision. Greedy for it, for the way I feel right now. I give in to it.

And when I stumble out of my house, my fingers smudged with ink, it’s dark and I am so very alive.

Chapter Three

Since I had come to the States, I had lived in almost every major city in the country. They each have their quirks and specialties, but move around enough and they all start to feel the same. 

Austin doesn’t feel that way. At least not yet.

It is this eclectic mix of modern culture and southern charm and creative freedom. And the best part?

I had nothing to do with it.

All the imagination and uniqueness is entirely a product of the people who live here. And they are my favorite part. The people are all so different. Hipsters and old money and artists and cowboys and geniuses of industry and technology and musicians and actors. Nowhere else but Austin could they (or would they) all fit together …
interact
like there are no differences between them.

Keep Austin Weird,
as they say
.

I weave through the crowds along Sixth Street downtown. It’s a mile or two south of campus, but now that I’m here, I don’t even remember the walk from my apartment. Which should worry me more, but it doesn’t. My mind and body are barely connected at the moment. Or maybe they’re more intertwined than ever … so in tune that I don’t even have to think about where I’m going or what I’m doing. Which frees up my mind for other things.

This section of downtown has been blocked off to traffic, and pedestrians teem through the streets, laughing and talking and singing. Neon signs glow in every other window, music drifts from doorways, and the smell from food trucks and restaurants wafts through the streets. I soak it all in, revel in it. I hear a catcall or two, but my focus is on the lights, the colors. When something catches my eye, I turn and follow.

An older man busks on the street corner, his guitar slung over his shoulders and his case open before him. The glint of the coins catches my eye, and then the music curls through my mind, lifting me up and onto a new plane. I stay with him for a while, sometimes dancing, sometimes singing along, until some new thing draws my attention.

Eventually, I find my way into a club, up a flight of stairs, and into the crush of bodies on a dance floor. This isn’t at all the kind of dance I used to inspire, used to enjoy, but there’s still something about it that makes me pause.

Sweat-slicked limbs.

Bodies pressed close.

Bass thrumming right through my skin.

There’s a strange kind of poetry in it. Raw and animalistic and desire in motion.

Once upon a time, I considered myself Greek, so I know a thing or two about hedonism. These days I don’t really claim any place as home. I belong nowhere, so nowhere belongs to me.

When I’m in the middle of the crowd, I stand still, picking out shapes and lines in the writhing bodies around me. It really is something to see—the way people interact. Whether they’re friends or lovers or strangers, everyone is connected on this dance floor. One body touches another that touches another without any insecurity, and I wish I weren’t the only one to see the beauty in it.

That gives me an idea, and I draw in a deep breath.
What if they could see it? What if I could make them?
Stretching out my arms, I push that breath out, expelling some of the energy swirling in my chest with it. My fingers graze and drag along anonymous skin.