A field of wildflowers corrodes the city sidewalk, a sea of yellow and pink petals floating to the seamless concrete. Expansive oak trees create an impermanent barrier between the two identities, their canopies casting a green glow about the walkway below. Their shadows are light, airy in the early morning, and gently blanket the row of park benches where he sits. His pale hair reflects the sun’s rays even in the shade, his equally ashen hand balancing a blue coffee cup on his knee – he appears distant, his eyes drifting meaninglessly over the city landscape.

My eyes walk to him, impulsively I sit there next to his still frame. He smiles that smile, the right corner of his mouth moving upwards only slightly and falling back to that solemn, far-away line. I come here often, and he is always in place – the mug filled with cold coffee always set upon his jeaned-knee, his long arm draped across of the backboard of the wooden bench, and his silver eyes looking glossy and tired. Knowledge of his existence escapes me, but as he always reminds me, it is not important.

However, although it is trivial, I inquire delicately about his life and he tells me about his love. It soon becomes enough for him to share, and with fluid hands, he hands the cup to me and explains his expansive hopes that will never come true. I nod small nods and shake my head when appropriate, my eyes drifting from his now focusing irises to the yellow petals of the field behind our backs – the blossoms scintillate in the rays, the color itself sparkling like fire caught in a low flame.

His voice is soft, the dialect swimming carefully somewhere in Europe, and as he decorates his ideals with florid words, I get lost in the seeping conversation. My mind begins to flutter with information, soaking up his utterances of love – somewhere in that hollow, shallow place I know that what he declares is important and that I should find ways to remember it.

And much like the meeting’s happening, it soon disappears as quickly as it appeared in a wave of shimmering gray, and I am sitting in front of a rectangular screen where a single white page – void of everything – and a blinking horizontal line taunts me. In that vacant place that many call a brain, I discover that what the fictional, pale man said was but a clip from the recesses of my mind and that what he disclosed moves my fingers across a clean keyboard.

I have found my muse.