When I would go out to the all-night eateries I would come home with her ramblings etched unto the back of placemats and napkins like the graffiti of my unsettled mind. She plagued me even after I left the venerated halls of academia. She set up residence in my one-room apartment on the edge of Oakland, drawing up stories from the well of my experiences; dating a 40 year old artist, flying kites at midnight to solace the girl whose apartment was robbed that evening, watching the svelte girl in the adjacent building roam about her curtain-less room in the nude, poetry-slam competitions, accordion jams in coffee shops, sex in elevators, and the eleven wedding summer. You were there for them all. You squeezed the essence of every event from my mind and distilled it into stories. You pulled poems from my daydreams and novellas from my naps.

Where has your siren song gone? Where there was song there is silence. Where there were words there is blank paper. Where there was ambition there is apathy. I have visited the ports of call and found them devoid. I have spent too long in the company of stodgy men and perhaps I lack the tools to navigate back to coves of creativity. I miss scaling your peaks of provocative prose, rolling in your fields of wild dreams and sleeping to rhythm of your rhyming waters.

Now I am the lonely mariner trying to triangulate you location without an astrolabe. I am the farmer sowing seeds on the rocky plateau without his plow and ox. I am the child lost in the woods without bread for crumbs.