Never Fall In Love With A Writer: A Short Story

“Never fall in love with a writer,” my Grandmother often said to me. “A gambler, a womanizer, even a drunk, fine, but never fall in love with a writer.”

I ignored her, of course.

Samuel was a poet, a novelist, and a songwriter. He was also a gambler, a drunk, and a womanizer, but above all else, he was a writer.

Oh, and what a writer he was! His words, his words, again and again, his words!

They were warm drops of late Summer rain against my skin.

Very soon, of course, I grew jealous of his notebook, his pen, but, of all my rivals, it was the page I hated the most.

He could caress a page for hours and days and weeks at a time — forgetting me, ignoring me, denying me — as the impossible focus of his passion probed its white depths and his pen ruined it with his reckless and wild tattoos.

He spoiled so many pages. He could spoil so many pages. Over and over again.

Then, after hours and days and weeks alone with his page, after hours and days and weeks of forgetting, ignoring, and denying me, he would make a page of me.

Too quickly, too easily, I forget his infidelities, in the orgry of his words made flesh on and in and through me.

There are, of course, very many pages — too many — and only one of me. How could I satisfy him? How could I? How could one of me be enough? No matter how much of me I had to give, too soon, he’d be back with his pages. Again, I’d be forgotten, ignored, denied.

Of course, I was forced to demand that he choose.  He could have his pages, he could have me, but he could not have all of us.

He must have loved me, at some level, because he tried. He really tried to give up his pages for me. Sometimes, he would last a few days. Maybe a week or two. On one occasion, after a particularly furious outburst from me, he even went a whole month without returning to the ruin of those perfect pages of his.

Finally, one day, all that was left of him was one more page addressed to me, and the sweetest farewell I have ever known.

He was not my first, my best, nor my last lover, but, I can’t forget him or ever be free. His words are always there to tempt me, in my loneliest hours, into thoughts of what might have been.

The words I could never hate, of course, because sometimes I was them and they me.

So, befriend a writer, even be close to one now and again, when he — or she, for that matter — has that wild desperate hunger in his eyes, but never, dear Granddaughter, never fall in love with a writer.