Neil Young

When I was young and had a blues band, she would meditate while I sipped vodka and wrote poems in my notebook.

Sometimes we'd argue about literature: I took exception to books she read--thrillers and romances and mysteries--as a waste of time. "You want a mystery," I said to her, "read Shakespeare, he's enough of a mystery for anyone."

Though we weren't married our marriage didn't last, and so we moved on to other marriages.

I traveled to foreign countries to do good things, forming little experiments with my life like getting out of bed at 3 a.m. to walk barefoot over floors cold as ice just to write something original, something that had woken me in the first place and which I promptly forgot the moment I started writing. Often, the social services were in decline and the government was led by a dictator propped up by the military establishment, just as it is now in my own country.

I finally learned to walk as far as my imagination would take me, and leave a few songs behind so I could follow them home.  

The last time I saw her I saw she'd become a muse. She said there's no such thing as silence, that even when you think it's completely still you're actually hearing what you see, and every object makes a sound whether or not it's in the dark.