A Letter to the Muse of the Crowded Place

Dear Muse,

You find me again—this time near the food court, where the air hums thick with fried sweetness and voices that clash like windblown leaves. You seem to like it here, where lives brush against one another and then scatter. You have no preference for silence. Instead, you arrive when the world is loud, when the neon lights pulse like heartbeats, when mothers hush babies and the cashier’s scanner beeps its rhythm.

It’s strange. Alone at my desk, you are absent, cold. But here—amid shoes skidding across linoleum and strangers laughing at things I’ll never know—you pull words out of me as though they’ve always been there. You make me see: the man with two bags of onions, the teenager rehearsing rebellion in her black boots, the woman whose hands tell more stories than her face ever will.

In the crowd, I lose myself and write as though I’ve found everything. I let their voices swirl into the pen, knowing they will not miss me—nor I them—when they are gone. But still, I thank them for being the noise I needed, for letting me slip quietly between their footsteps.

Yours always,

A Scribe in the Wild

November 2024