[ WP ] Write a story about the personification of loneliness .

Everyone needs a muse. Some get visions, neatly packaged and delivered, by Religion. Some find gems, abandoned by capricious Inspiration where they may be discovered by chance. Some build their fantasies themselves, but even these do-it-yourself types follow the carefully complicated instructions and diagrams left behind by Experience. 
 
 The crumpled young man you passed without noticing this morning, taking up less of his subway seat than it seemed he should, as if he were slowly imploding towards some inexorable gravitational pull deep inside himself, was n't in business with Religion or Inspiration or even Experience, as far as he could help it. 
 
 His muse was Loneliness, and if you had looked very closely ( although, given the lady's nature, it would have been nearly impossible for you to do so ) you would have noticed her there on the subway as well. 
 
 She has short, scruffy hair and deep, still eyes full of old, unbroken silences and the sound of small things shattering. She may or may not wear glasses. 
 
 She's a good muse, as muses go, and not bad company, as long as she does n't bring any friends. Self-pity, for example, tends to follow her around when he has nothing better to do, and his presence renders her both unhelpful and unpleasant. But alone, Loneliness is alright. 
 
 Right now, she is alone, and so is the man she accompanies. They are n't on the subway anymore. Instead, they sit companionably in the shabby kitchen of a small apartment with a view of a thousand far away little lives, glowing in a convincing impression of lit city windows. She is happy; small, high up places with four walls and a door that locks are almost as holy to her as large, craggy spaces that echo. He is also content, more comfortable with her than he is with most real people, although it was n't that way a year ago, before they had spent enough time together to become friends. 
 
 They sit across from each other at the kitchen table. Loneliness mimes secrets to him in complex sign-language. She opens doors in the air and windows behind his own eyes and shows him wonders. She conjures up solemn truths and fantastical, colorful lies and presents them to him like toys. 
 
 He turns her gifts into sketchbooks full of the wistful faces of people who do n't exist and spindle-armed trees that transform into flocks of birds and butterflies, poems scrawled in the elegant haste of revelation, inhabiting the corners of pages and skulking in margins. 
 
 She does not speak. When she must express something through words, she lets him speak for both of them, and he experiences, as always, a brief stab of awkward shame at the thought of talking to himself, alone in his apartment, like a schizophrenic. Shame is another of the lady's frequent companions, but his presence here is a distraction, and she shoos him away impatiently. 
 
 Loneliness knows she hurts the man sometimes, but she helps him, too. He would n't be who he was without her. He would n't be *anyone* without her. Just another twittering, shallow spiggot of meaningless noise. The others, the ones he envies ( when Envy drops by for a visit ) will be nothing in a few decades, shouts that leave not even an echo behind them, but the things she gives him will last. He knows this, sometimes, but still he wavers. 
 
 Between them on the table, a pen dances across paper, gripped tightly in his hand and her gaze. He mutters her words and breaths her silence. The poem grows like something living. Line after true line. It unfurls, winglike, across the bright paper. 
 
 And then the the phone rings. 
 
 He glances up, startled, and Loneliness shudders. Sharp and harsh, relentless, the noise punctures the air. Ring after ring, merciless. He arises slowly, taking hold of the phone, and speaks the word `` Hello?'' as if struggling to remember its meaning. 
 
 `` Stephanie?'' His posture changes, widens and pulls itself taller, and Loneliness blinks and narrows her still eyes. `` Wow, umm... no. No, I'm not seeing anyone right now, not since you and I...'' His voice drops low, obliterating evidence of the past year. Loneliness hears her silent place inside him flooded and buried, by the shrill laughter on the other end of the phone and his own deep-voiced reply. She nods once, twice, presses her lips together. She flickers quietly, then she's gone. `` Tonight? Yeah, no problem... 7 ok? Great. Yeah. No. I'm glad too. Definitely'' 
 
 He leaves the small, high up room with it's four walls and a door that locks. The poem sits unfinished, flightless, on the table. On the subway to the bar, he takes up his whole seat. 
 
 He smiles when he sees Stephanie, and she smiles back. They drink, talk, laugh and laugh and laugh. Sometimes at something funny, but usually at nothing at all. The evening is fast and busy and warm and noisy, and then the rest of his life is too. He lives happily ever after, and he does n't leave anything behind when he's gone. 
 
 And Loneliness misses him, sometimes, and the things he could have been, but she is silent on the subject, as she is on so many others. 
 
 

