A Night with Emerson

Chicago is a city of opportunity. The only downside to opportunity is that it makes its occupants restless. Every man, woman, and child feels a strong sense of freedom no matter how tied down they truly are, whether it be to their job, their dreams, or their personal relationships, there is always something else available around the next corner. People change their college majors every week, they ditch what they first thought was love for the next even small prospect of it with someone else, and every party you attend is only a brief pit stop before the next. For me... that seized and dropped opportunity was Emerson. He had the hair of a ball of twine, thick and unpredictable, just like the brain beneath it. His smile was bright and alluring, always sucking in its target like a vacuum mouthed beast. He was intelligent and constantly at war with himself inside his own mind. He could list every one of the world's countries and say something good about it and its people. The kind of man who loved all, but was equally capable of destroying all if his heart contended it.

I remember the day I met him. He took the same poetry workshop as me in the warm summer months of Chicago. He sat across a long and narrow room from me, staring me down as our sandy haired professor tried his best to inspire this new generation of students with a poem of his own. Fittingly, the poem was about a man devouring a soft and gentle peach on a hot summer day. Somehow the two of us had each migrated to the head of the long table that filled the room, a true tell of our personalities. The leaders. The dominant and fearless. The man and the peach, roles yet to be decided. He stared deep into my eyes with an instigative smirk as I let myself stare back, feeling a strong sense of intrigue and desire to know the smug b*****d in front of me. As most first days go in college, the class was largely spent introducing ourselves to the professor and our new classmates. Each word out of his mouth that day was said with a continuous gaze directly at me and I began to wonder how he would describe me in that moment. I began to wonder what forces were out there that could take two complete strangers and draw them so strongly to each other in a matter of seconds.

I had found a new sense of confidence within the city's limits that year and once something caught my attention, I was not going to give up until it was mine. Emerson was the same way but he was much quicker to act. As we all stood to exit the room he reached for my arm and spun me around.

"I want to buy you coffee." he said those words with the confidence of a modern day prince, knowing it was every girls childhood dream to one day be her own version of Cinderella. I accepted, because in that moment I could not imagine focusing on anything else but him in the hours to come, whether I was to be a princess or not.

As we wandered slowly toward the coffee shop I second and third guessed myself, wondering whether I should be walking next to him enjoying his dreamy melted chocolate colored eyes or heading to my next class, but the closer we got to the coffee shop the less I could think about anything else but what I had found in him. Something about him was awakening every writer's vein I had in body, inspiring me to read, to write, to be a part of something bigger than just me. No one had ever entertained my mind so entirely before. I had finally found it... the thing every writer dreams of discovering, my muse.

Reviews

[Jake Donald Stephens]

Inspiration can sometimes come unexpectedly. This story reminds us of that. Well written. :)