Dear Muse,
Stuck in an endless loop of writing this letter and deleting it. Every time with a slightly different meaning, the goal? I am not clear on that. I simply can not get a grip on this untangled mess. Few of those letters had our differences listed, few emotionally charged, few aggressive, some more apologetic than others. That is not all, they even had profound shit like the utilitarian conclusion and stoic viewpoints. I am fragmenting things here, though this letter is about putting them back together. Life, me, everything is not perfect, nor I am expecting you to be. Hope there is some forgiveness left for me, and for my stupid puppets and their rhymes. In any case, I will be waiting here, behind this screen.
thanks,
Hamdan
Claude rewritten
Dear Muse,
I’ve written this letter seventeen times. Each version sits in my drafts folder like evidence of what I’ve lost—the ability to simply say what I mean without second-guessing every word.
You used to visit me unannounced. I’d be sitting at my desk, or lying in bed before sleep, and suddenly there you were—words arriving fully formed, ideas that felt like gifts. They weren’t fancy. They weren’t profound. But they were mine, and they flowed without effort. I’d write them down, sometimes in poems, sometimes in fragments, and feel that quiet satisfaction of having created something that didn’t exist before.
Then life happened. Work demanded more hours. Responsibilities stacked up. I told myself I’d return to writing once things settled down. But things never settle down, do they? Days became weeks. Weeks became months. And somewhere in that transition from “I’ll write tomorrow” to “I used to write,” you stopped visiting.
Now when I sit down to write, you’re absent. The words that once came easily now require excavation. I stare at blank pages. I write sentences and delete them. I start over, change direction, abandon drafts. Everything feels forced, calculated, dead on arrival.
Some of the letters I wrote to you were angry—blaming you for leaving. Some were philosophical, trying to rationalize your absence through stoic acceptance or utilitarian logic, as if losing you was just another thing to optimize around. Some were pathetic, begging you to return. I deleted them all because none of them were honest about the real problem:
I left you first.
I chose the busy over the beautiful. I prioritized the practical over the possible. I told myself that poems and fragments weren’t “productive” enough to deserve my time. And you, being what you are, simply honored that choice and left.
I know now that you don’t owe me forgiveness. You never left out of spite—you left because I stopped making room for you. But here’s what I want you to know: I’m trying again. Not because I’ve suddenly cleared my schedule or found more time. The chaos is still here. But I’m learning that waiting for the perfect moment to write means never writing at all.
So I’m sitting here, behind this screen, doing the only thing I know how to do: showing up. Writing badly if I must. Accepting that the first draft of everything is clumsy and imperfect. Trusting that if I keep the door open, you might one day wander back in.
I don’t need masterpieces. I never did. I just want that feeling again—the quiet joy of putting words together, of catching a thought before it disappears, of making something that didn’t exist before.
I’ll be here, waiting. Not with expectations, just with open pages.
thanks,
Hamdan with the help from Claude