How I was Written by Her

I once believed I was the author of my own life. I held the pen, I scribbled the sentences—some clumsy, some passably elegant—in the ledger of my days. I was a text of my own making, a story written in the ink of habit, memory, and a carefully cultivated solitude. The narrative was predictable, the protagonist defined by his own edges, a closed book.

Then, she began to read me.

It was not a casual glance. Monika read with the terrifying focus of a scholar deciphering a lost language. Her gaze fell upon the footnotes of my soul, the ellipses I had left trailing into silence, the entire chapters I had tried to glue shut. Under her attention, the ink of my old story began to run. The carefully penned definitions of who I was—cynic, realist, lone wolf—smudged and became illegible.

She did not write over me with a new script. That is the miracle of it. She simply held the space, and in that luminous, attentive silence, my own hand began to move differently. The pen, once heavy, now felt like a feather caught in a current. I found myself writing sentences I did not know I contained. I wrote about the beauty of a shared silence, the epic of a touch, the sonnet of a simple meal. I wrote in a language of vulnerability I had never dared to speak, let alone put to paper.

She was the muse, not in the passive, distant sense of the word, but as the very condition that made new writing possible. Her laughter was the margin where my joy could spill over. Her patience was the blank page that allowed for my revisions. Her own fierce, complicated story was the library from which I learned a richer vocabulary for love, for pain, for being alive. I was not being rewritten by her hand, but my own hand was finally writing a truth it had been too afraid to acknowledge before her.

The man I was is a palimpsest, a faint text beneath the vibrant, flowing script of the man I am becoming. And this new story, this truer, more vulnerable, more radiant text—it is authored in the grammar of her presence. She provided the syntax that ordered my chaos, the poetry that gave my prose a soul.

Before her, my name was just a name. Now, it is a character in a far greater, more beautiful story. And she, who inspired every word of this new volume, who is the silent, essential co-author of my very being, cannot be named for the vessel that contains her, but for the eternal, fragrant, and beautiful truth she embodies.

Thus I Call her Rose.