He asked “Why are you a writer?”, what came next changed his life forever.

“Why are you a writer?” he asked across the table.

“I needed to find my lover,” came the reply.

“How?”

A sigh, a moment, and then the letting go.

She came to me in words, in the music that flowed from somewhere out there, into me, and out through my fingers. She’d whisper to me in songs that set my mind to dancing, and in music that set my body into motions I have never known. She’d wake me from my sleep with rays of light peeking above my life’s horizon. 

She blinded me with love so that I would always, always, see. I write to paint the pictures of her that my open eyes now see. I use words to beat a path through the underbrush, a path that leads to me. I share bits of me that I leave laying on the ground, hoping she’ll follow that trail into my open arms.

She came to me a million moments before I met her, and I’ve loved her from the first. There is no rhyme or reason, or words set to page that can tell you how I really feel. Yet my words are not for you, they’re for her. She knows, and one day she will be, and my story will be complete. 

“Wow,” said he, “that’s amazing. How do you know she’ll come?”

Because she has to. She can’t help herself. Be it in this life or some other, she will come. Until then, I set my pen to page, my heart to beating, my soul to searching, and I love her just the same. 

I’ll never need to let her go because I will never have ever trapped her. She is, as we speak, flying freely and bathing in the choices of her design. When she comes, we’ll be ready. Until then, there is a life to live and a space that needs preparing. Love is, or should be, like that. We don’t find each other suddenly, we’re in each other all along.

“I wish you well,” said he. “Sounds like a fairy tale to me.”

Perhaps it is. One that ends, “and they lived happily ever after.” We all live in stories, I wish mine to end like that.

“Me too,” said he. “I never thought of it like that. Thank you. I don’t feel so bad about being single.”

We laughed, we toasted, and set to waiting once again.