Don’t Love A Writer

By Erin Deborah Waks

Don’t love a writer. 

Everything you say might end up as prose in her notebook, every word you speak will be pulled apart by the wirings of her mind. She will choose every word she uses, might read as much into yours, forgetting not everyone sees something ordinary and feels something much more.

She’ll always have something to say, and struggles with stillness. She’s never had the option to sit quietly, to stop entertaining, to press pause on being a conduit for others to feel better. She’s always had to be ‘on’, so when you give her the option to switch off, she might not know how.

Some days you’ll be the villain, the one she furiously writes about on a page. Other days you’ll be a hero, her friend, a muse, the reason she writes. And on hard days, you’ll be an innocent bystander, watching as she writes herself as the villain. You’ll sometimes be forced to watch someone you love - your sister, your friend, your lover - hate herself on the page, and then save herself at the same time.

You will never keep up. You can never tell her how you feel with words, because hers have the clarity needed while yours are messy, confusing, blurred.

To love a writer is to be completely enmeshed in the life of an observer, to be an onlooker as someone tries to understand things more deeply than you would know how, to watch someone create things, ideas, out of nothing but a glance.

Don’t love a writer, it will be the hardest thing you do. We are complex and messy and unable to be idle. 

And yet - 

To love a writer means to be loved back with more fervor than you knew possible. And never to question it, because those words the writer writes might be written just for you.