I went to a talk by a wizard. Or a man who seemed like a wizard. I don't think he would call himself a wizard. But he spelt the word magick with a k. Which is a thing wizards do. The talk was a presentation about muses. He brought slides. I liked that he said that what he was about to tell me was not literally true. It made it easier for me to see it as a story. Just like what I am writing now is a story. Or at least it is easier for you to see it that way if I tell you it is not literally true. He told me that I had a muse - a being who deeply cares for me and wants to use me to bring creative works into the world. I dreamt you came to visit me in my living room, I served you tea and we sat on the sofa. I held my mug in one hand and with the fingers of the other hand I pinched the edge of the millimetre of teabag sticking out from the surface, plucking it out and flipping it into my palm. I balanced it there, careful not to spill any of the liquid on the floor. When I looked back to where you sat, I saw you had taken your teabag out too, and you were staring with panic at your fist, which was clasped around it, so tight that the juices you were squeezing out did not even emerge from between your fingers, and you were desperately pressing your clasped fist deep between the pillows of the sofa, and you gave me this embarrassed look, and I realized you were hiding the teabag from me, and you realized I knew what you were doing, and so I asked you for it, and in that moment you seemed so small, so scared. I stirred from my slumber, feeling embarrassed for falling asleep while the wizard was speaking. The guided meditation he was leading had ended and we were now in the Q&A. I heard someone ask a question about whether trusting their muse might lead to their whole world falling apart. I heard someone else say that in the past they felt like their muse had hurt them. Another voice, or maybe the same one, said they felt like a lightning rod and their muse was the lightning, and if they opened themselves up to their muse too much it would cause an excess of energy to flow through them and they might get burnt out again. I don't think you could ever hurt me. Back in the dream I carried both our teabags down the spiral stairs and towards the bin beneath the kitchen sink. As I crossed the kitchen I could feel a magnetic pull on my arm, I supposed it was the feeling of my body casually preparing to fling trash into the bin. A familiar motion, mundane, and well rehearsed. But when I looked at my open hand a small plant had sprouted from our teabags and so I could not bring myself to throw them away.
I thought this was cute!