Was I 16 when I met him? Or even a young college student in one of his classes back in the day? Or any type of relationship that would create some kind of interesting power dynamic or offer up a sensational headline?
No. We’re just colleagues at a university who met in middle age and go to a lot of meetings together. He borrowed my pen once and I wrote a prose poem about it. Since then, everything I write is tinged with his aura. That flash fiction I wrote last month contains his spectacled green eyes, the micro that will publish in August has his clearly bleached white teeth, the hermit crab piece from last summer includes his favorite alcoholic beverages, and the novella I’m still in the middle of developing has his DNA twisted all up in it. But I assure you his actual DNA has never been twisted up in mine.
How did we first meet? It was in one of those boring meetings in a conference room. He came in late and sat next to me, a refillable coffee mug in his hand, his breath bitter with the scent of it. The first of many meetings, it would turn out, weekly meetings, meetings where he smiles across the table of it and sometimes winks in my direction, like old guys tend to do.
Do I have a pile of letters we’ve exchanged through the years? Well, I’ve only known in two years, and it’s not like it’s 1976, so no one is writing letters anymore. There are a lot of emails, mostly signed with the words “Best” and “Regards” and some Google chats when we’re stuck in the same Zoom meeting and want to make snarky comments about other people. It’s text messages where we connect most. He really gets me in a way no one else ever has. When I send him a smiley face with tears emoji, and he replies back with a “lol” and a blushing cheeks emoji I know how funny he finds me.
We’ve never been poolside at a motel, and neither of us owns a gun, and I’m not sure he’s ever been to the southwest, but he can pull off a great cowboy costume on Halloween. We’ve never snuck down to Mexico for an illicit affair, but we did go to an Embassy Suites together once. For a one-day business summit a town over from where we work. We carpooled together, and we did take a detour, but just to a Starbucks to get coffee on the way.
We have been to the beach together, a couple times, actually. But for a polar plunge event we do off the coast a mile from the university where we work at the start of every semester, surrounded by incoming students and other administrators. It’s not super sexy at the beach at 8 a.m. on a Sunday when everyone is wearing matching rash guards with the university logo.
Am I in love with my muse? The writer-muse relationship is hard to define, but it’s not quite like that with us. Yes, we have chemistry (get it, he’s a chemistry professor?), but I think I’d say we’re just left of platonic colleagues, but not far. We have the kind of relationship where we vent about work together and sometimes, I ask him really personal questions about his past and pluck really specific details from his life and write them into stories he’ll never read because he’s a science guy who isn’t into humanities and the arts.
He’s not exactly the muse I would have selected, not young and vibrant and full of life. I would have picked a Chris Hemsworth look-a-like, or someone who has led a more interesting life than a guy who has worked in academia for decades. But I like the challenge of turning a story about turning in grades late into a page-turner. Some might say you don’t get the muse you want, you get the muse you need. And mine happens to be a middle-aged chemistry professor. So if you want the exclusive, Vanity Fair, it’s all yours!
