She had her way. He became a man.
The one he should be, could be, and the one she thought she wanted.
Soon, her inspiration dwindled, then drifted. She wrote poetry before him, and was inspired by him, but too busy in love to pick up her pen.
The years tore past them, as they tend to, and with them, so too flew her chances of being who she thought she could be. Would be.
Now, she resides beside the window—his old decrepit wife—neck bent, crippled from leaning over her writing bureau, hour upon hour, writing few words and having even fewer thoughts of her own. She rarely produced anything, and yet, it was there she sat, day after day, back scrunched and hunched over clean, white pages.
And, as time tends to, it froze her. Just like that. Sitting at her desk, alone.
She became as relevant as the pen in her hand, as static as the desk and paper itself. A permanent part of the furniture: inconsequential and lifeless—the only indication of her humanity remained in her chronic sigh.
Soon he forgot about her. Time does that, too.
She started sleeping in the chair by the desk, trapping herself inside a world that could not—would not—exist unless she wrote it herself. Which she could not do. And, all the while, she refused to live in the real one. The happy one. The one they’d made, chosen, written—the one he lived in, too.
But his dreams were different from hers. They’d always been different.
He didn’t seek remembrance, immortality, material. He was no great thinker, philosopher, poet. He was interested in making his life beautiful, simple, and swollen with meaning.
But she, the broken woman with her blank pages, was too proud for any of it. And now melts into her chair—a perfectly tangled conclusion of wanting too much.