A conversation with my emotions.

So you're back, then. Didn't take long for you to get bored, did it? Listen, I know we go way back but you should have read the sign:

Dear feelings,
                        Kindly sod off.
Regards,
Dan.

It's not enough for you lot, is it? That I let you in here once. Not enough that I let you wreck the gaff. Not enough for you to sneak out like reverse thieves in the night; leaving all my stuff but adding to my collection of shit with your own baggage? No, you wait until I've reorganised the joint to accommodate all the crap you left me with (I can't seem to get rid of it, so I've just had to make room) and then you come back hammering on the door to get in again. Where've you been? Where were you? And more importantly, where did you take the only apparent salve for the pain you caused me: the comfort of your constancy? Suddenly it was gone, throwing doubt on whether it had ever existed at all.

Wherever you've been you seem to have brought even more crap back with you this time than you had last time. Which would be fine if I could trust you to stick around and help me sort it out. But I know that would be myopic in the extreme. I see now that I gave you too much credit last time. And now you want me to trust you again? I get to a place where your absence doesn't hurt any more and you want me to open up to the possibility that you'll do it all again? To present you with the same target?

Sure, why not? The kettle's on, your songs are on the jukebox and I made a space for your shit. Wipe your feet on the way in.

Here we go again

I've got a new muse. I'm still working out what that means, if I'm honest. Where does this feeling come from? Why do certain people just make you want to be creative? What is it about them that you have to, in your own way, build monuments to them? Some would say that love is a characteristic of the relationship between muse and artist (in my own case I use that word for severe want of a better term) and to a point I agree. I have certainly derived creative energy from love and can easily see how one could fall in love with a muse. But is it the defining characteristic? Hard to say of course as the precise nature of love is subjective and the concept of muse is somewhat fluid. Nonetheless my gut instinct is no, being loved is not the main ingredient needed for musehood.
   I wouldn't even know where to start trying to decide what is the magic formula for how muses come to be and at any rate I'm currently more concerned with the personal questions this raises. What does this mean for my feelings towards my old muse? Am I going to enter into the same spiral of love and depression I felt last time? Given that there is no way this can end well, can we just not, please?
   The latter two questions are easily answered. Firstly, yes, I am going to fall in love again (the process is already well under way, if I'm honest) and since the result of me falling in love has only ever been me becoming depressed then that seems nailed on too. Secondly, unfortunately, I can't just ignore the muse. Having spent the best part of a decade now (good God, really? tempers fugit) trying to harness this feeling I know that once someone is under your skin in that way, you can't get rid of them. The first of my questions is harder to answer. That person who was the driving force behind my attempts at artistic expression has now been out of my life longer than they were in it (in terms of interacting socially and so on) so it's no surprise that the energy I could draw from that source has waned, or that my desire for creative ability has at last latched onto a new one, but can I say now that the love which was the kindling on which my creative fires were fed has gone? No. My beliefs about what love is don't allow for that and I still firmly believe that I felt love for my former muse. But if that is the case then how am I to understand these new feelings already beginning to stir in me? I don't see any reason why one couldn't reasonably love two people in that way but it still feels like a betrayal of the person who caused seven years of such a deep emotional experience. New love bursting on to the scene can only lead me to question my feelings but most of my identity over the last seven years was based on my belief in the primacy and constancy of a love that I felt. Therefore to question my feelings is to question the existence of the personality I think of as me.
   I've often wondered if there is no constant and continuous "self" and we become several different selfs over the course of our lives. This would be nice. Distancing myself from the mistakes of my past would be a breeze if I could claim I'm not the same me now that I was then and it'd be comforting to think that in a space-time multiverse, there's always a me out there who will forever love his muse as he swore to do, even if the self I claim as me in the here and now has trouble deciding on his feelings on that front.
   I think in the end I will just have to accept what is coming, crank up the heartbreak playlist and try to make the best of things, I may never understand love or the muse but then I don't really need to. All I need to do is harness the pain, try to make it work for me and find a way to keep going day-to-day. I may still feel a traitor to my old self and I may feel like I've suffered a great loss in abandoning my old muse but the way things are can not be rearranged to avoid any hurt feelings on my part.
   Such a practical view is of as little help as a chocolate teapot as regards resolving the problem I have with sorting out my emotions but probably the only reason I really care about that in the first place is because I'd grown comfortable with my old unrequited love and the resulting sadness and am facing great discomfiture as I face new unrequited love and sadness. In my view, such self-centred thinking means I probably deserve the pain I'm about to start feeling but seriously, can we just not, please?