Seeking the Wild Muse

My legs are sorer than I ever recall them having been and my skin is marred with no less than nine mosquito bites. I counted them last night while trying to fall asleep under a scratchy quilt in a cabin without adequate air conditioning. If I had been in a rational state of mind, I might have asked myself why I would possibly think that spending a couple weeks in the middle of nowhere with little more modern amenities than a working bathroom and a place to plug in my phone, which is mostly just serving as a glorified notebook at this point, would be a good idea. Not that I have anything to write in said notebook. Not that I've had anything to write at all for the past month and a half, hence the so-far desperate attempt at forcing myself to find inspiration now by going on this "writing retreat," which I'm starting to think was just how Thalia described this excursion because she knew I never would have agreed to join her if she called it a "vacation."

"It isn't far now," she insists as I bat a low-hanging branch out of my path before I get a mouthful of pine needles. There isn't a single drop of sweat forming on the back of her neck or slicking down her long blonde ponytail.

I almost hate how effortless she is with everything from writing brilliant sci-fi short stories to venturing along this hiking trail as though it's her natural habitat, but Thalia isn't the kind of person too many people are capable of hating.

She's vibrant and extroverted, and, somehow, she decided by the end of our first class together, Creative Short Fiction, that we should be the best of friends. I don't even know why. Maybe she thought she needed an "emotional support boring girl" to tell about all the wild parties and concerts and other sorts of gatherings she could never drag me to.

She's a throwback to when authors were meant to be bombastic, larger than life eccentrics who went on archaeological digs and hosted lavish parties for everyone in their social circle, resulting in the creation of several stories that weren't solely the kind to be written down and hailed as classics for centuries to come. She's the kind of writer people would want to buy a memoir from.

Nobody wants to read the inner workings of a mind that's content to spend an indefinite amount of quiet evenings at home with freshly brewed tea and no sense of longing to venture outside of that cozy little bubble, a mind that made it through four years each of high school and college without ever going to a party or getting drunk, much less accomplishing anything worth writing a book about. That's what fiction is for.

I guess things always come easy to you when you're Thalia.

She's probably had at least fifty new story ideas from the moment we started driving, just like how she immediately knew exactly what she was going to write the second we got our assignments. It wasn't worth comparing ourselves, really, because we were just such different types of writers, from our writing styles to our grade point averages, but I'd be lying if I said I never envied how quick she always has been to find inspiration, especially now with how elusive it's been to me.

She's probably never spent a single moment since our graduation worrying about who she even is without the academic life she left behind, never based her entire sense of self worth on the grades she got in class.

"Can we take a protein bar break or something?" I ask as my footfalls start to feel especially heavy against the hardened dirt of the trail.

"Everyone knows you can't eat right before swimming, silly." She turns around and takes a seat at the side of the path, to my relief. I immediately join her. "Have some water."

As I take my first sip of water, I desperately search my surroundings for something, anything really, that stands out as something I can write about. I want the trees to be metaphors, something reaching up towards the clouds but always bound by their roots to the dirt below them. There must be something poetic in that, but my brain refuses to make any connections.

I'm not sure why I thought that would work when nothing else on my grand “anti-writer’s block agenda” had seemed to make this “retreat” seem worth the trouble. Spending hours dedicated to staring up at the sprawling night sky, seeing the constellations more clearly than I ever had before out in this vast wilderness instead of an empty screen for once, hadn't done anything to evoke anything more than an awestruck incapacity to describe such an overwhelmingly beautiful sight. Neither had more-or-less forcing myself to partake in the bonfires, or hearing the clamor of the bonfire parties going on long past the time I had returned to our cabin to try to sleep. Every single pointless "arts and crafts" activity Thalia had signed us up for, insisting that it would “open up the creative side” of my clearly uncooperative brain, had proven equally futile. Not even watching the spider spinning its web in the far corner of our cabin's hallway for several minutes on end had sparked anything beyond a concern as to whether or not it was venomous.

Failing that self-imposed assignment, I mentally mark down a firm cursive "needs improvement" to myself in imaginary red ink. No marshmallow-scented sticker emblazoned with a s'mores pun my brain isn't feeling clever enough to think up right now for me, I guess. Wow, I really am hungry.

Thalia's typing out something as I take another sip, and I know we don't have the connection for it to be a search for directions. Besides, she's already memorized the map and all the fastest routes to find help if one of us gets hurt. Knowing Thalia's creativity, she's probably written no less than three scenarios in which that knowledge factors into the primary plot by now.

I pause a little longer than I intended to let her finish typing. And maybe because a part of me wants to delay the inevitable conclusion of our hike, even if another part of my mind feels like staying still too long leaves us liable to get mauled by a wolverine, which Thalia insists isn't native to this area, or else trampled by whatever kind of deer actually is native to this region.

After another half-hour of hiking, we arrive at the lake. I must look terrified, because Thalia assures me once again just how safe this is. The statistics and the presence of a lifeguard on duty don't do much to quell the way my stomach is turning ever more violently with each step we take to ascend the nearby cliff, though.

"It's going to be fun," Thalia insists as she peels off the outer layers of her clothes to reveal a fuchsia one-piece swimsuit. I follow her movements with much less enthusiasm. "You'll be glad you had this experience to write about."

I want to reply that it's easy for her to say, because she always seems “glad” to have experiences that couldn't sound even remotely appealing to my own interests, but she knows how badly I want the inspiration to write something by the end of this torturous multi-week excursion and knew exactly how to draw upon that anxiety when she said that.

"You've got this, girl!" Thalia encourages as I step up to the ledge of the cliff. I wish I believed her.

This has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever done, even worse than that one time Thalia had to come get me after I locked myself out of her apartment when she let me crash on her couch while she stayed out late at a party.

How would Thalia do this? Thalia of the reckless sense of adventure, the enthusiasm, the joie de vivre, as the French call it. I keep my arms outstretched at my sides, then close my eyes, feeling the wind rushing around me. I want to pretend that this is what flying would feel like, how fledglings feel right as they're about to take that first step out of the nest, having to put their trust in their wings for the first time in their lives. I take a deep breath and find myself surprisingly calm in the face of what feels like the worst decision of my life.

My moment of zen is interrupted, though, by a sound that could only generously be compared to a bicycle horn playing through a kazoo blaring out from above.

Even though I know I'm not going to like what I see, I open my eyes and look up anyway.

Geese. Feathery harbingers of doom.

Wait.

That's kind of good. Maybe not the most highbrow literary metaphor I've ever thought up, but certainly the idea of geese as "harbingers" has got to count for something. Why should ravens and vultures get all the morbid fun in the avian omen realm?

"You go ahead," I tell Thalia, stepping back to where our bags are tucked aside. "I've got something I need to write down."

"See? I told you this writing retreat was going to help you."

I shake my head, wondering whether she really did have this all planned - if she knew that between the hunger and the sleep deprivation, I'd inevitably get so frustrated that my mind would have to push out something vaguely inspired eventually - as she fearlessly dives into the water.

After everything I checked off my perfectly premeditated agenda, the one thing that got my mind un-blocked had to be these annoying fuckin’ geese.