This Is What Happens When You Fall In Love With A Writer

Don’t fall in love with a writer because when we love, we love hard. Anything less than a love Jane Austen would write about is not the love for us. The love we give will be robust, all consuming, rich. It will touch all facets of your senses and vocabulary you never dreamed of. Aged, for we have lived many years and many lives through the text of others.  We will weave our affections around you like we do the words of a good story. We will love with every fiber in our milky white bones. We will study you and read you and learn more about you from observing than you intended. The way you tap your pencil when you are in deep thought or the way you linger over your coffee in the morning, the way you run your right hand through your hair when you are overcome with stress and let it linger there as if waiting for a solution, no trait goes unnoticed. And when we let you in, it isn’t merely that you make our hearts skip a beat but it dances and there is a pitter-patter in the pirouette like motions of a tiny ballerina just prancing around at the thought of you.

You aren’t simply the first thing we think of in the morning, you are the thought that consumes us, taking all of our good senses hostage and refusing to loosen its grasp. The protagonists in all of our fictions will carry parts of you. These bastard children made between your actions and our words that you know nothing about will roam about on reams of printed pages coming into the lives of strangers everywhere.

Do not touch a writer because if you do, then you are truly doomed. Our union will be like poetry, filling you up with emotions more beautiful than you could ever fathom, and the end will leave you just as empty and longing for explanations. But you will be no closer to understanding why your belly still burns with a desire for us, than we are to knowing where the less traveled road led Frost long after we’ve read, and long after you have touched.

We will write romances around every call you miss and date you break, believing deep down you are still the hero we painted you out to be. It is our job after all to know the characters we put in our stories, so our hero must not fall. When you are late we will be sure you were saving the world as only our hero could.

Don’t hurt a writer because the sadness that will resonate isn’t sadness at all but a gaping hole threatening to swallow us up and spit us out chewed up and different. Not broken, but changed, and the only way to cope is to write you down as a problem in a much more elaborate plot. You now become an antagonist that must be defeated and overcome. From the beginning you were bound to be a part of our story but now your role has changed.

Don’t try to reconcile because when we accept your invitation to coffee you’ll never know if when we agree it is for a selfish need to investigate your character further, you know, a chance to tie the loose ends in your chapter we hadn’t anticipated.  When we empathetically place our hands over yours at the table and say, “I always wondered what happened with your father” You won’t know that we only half care but fully need to know more about your character’s complexities.

We will remember falling for you the way we remember reading the novel that made us fall in love with literature to begin with, the way each page reeled us in further and further until we were hooked. And we just had to finish it, had to see it through to the end, even if it broke us.

So you may have underestimated the threat or the power of your writer. You may have assumed we didn’t understand the world or we could never see things your way, but the truth is we can see it your way and every way there is but we pick and choose what visions to keep and which to throw back into the see of perceptions. The times you rolled over in disgust upset that the light from the computer screen and the tapping of the keyboard was disturbing your sleep thinking you couldn’t stand being kept awake for one more senseless article, you miscalculated. But there was once a man who built a whole gospel around his great love turned divine enemy and now the world calls him Devil.

Just imagine what we can do to you.