She started whispering to me beneath the shade of our beach umbrella, during moments when I would unplug from whatever novel I was hungrily devouring that day. I’d stare out at the shimmering sea and simmering sands and I’d listen as this new muse shared with me her story.

It has been quite a while since I heard a muse speak to me, even prior to recent events that left a splintering silence within my mind. My most recent, Eddie, went quiet quite a while ago, which still saddens me. His was a funny, dark story that I very much enjoyed. I hope he comes back to me soon, to finish his tale.

So I made very certain to pay close attention to this new voice. She’s left me no name so far. That doesn’t really bother me much. She can remain nameless if that’s her preference. Beyond a strange hatred of sand, which admittedly I share with her, she seems surprisingly…normal. I’m not used to that.

I’m not typically drawn to “whole” characters. In both my own writing and the creations of others, I’m constantly drawn to and inevitably fall in love with the most damaged of the lot: the widowed CMO, the emotionally scarred ex-freedom fighter, the alcoholic Viper pilot with the damaged past, the brooding CSI with Diastema and dark secrets, the FBI agent whose entire life hinges on locating a sister missing since childhood. There is beauty in their flaws and fractures that I simply cannot resist.

So to have a character come to me with relatively no imperfections? I’m baffled. And a tad bit concerned. Can I do her justice? We’re always tasked as writers to “write what we know.” I know imperfection. Truth is, I prefer imperfection.

Then again, the “what I know” at the moment is too much for me to write right now.

I visited my mom’s grave for the first time on Sunday. Her body is buried slightly fewer than 50 miles away from me.

In weiter Ferne, so nah!

The veterans’ cemetery has yet to place a proper grave stone for her. I’m actually thankful. The thought of seeing both my parents’ names on a grave marker is a bit more than I want to handle at the moment. His must be there because he is the veteran. She simply happened to be the first casualty.

So for the first time, I stood on the ground above my mother’s grave and glimpsed the vastness of something to which I’m nowhere near edging closer. That vastness is more than I may ever be able to wrap myself around properly. At least not alone.

Here, in my lair, this public forum of private mourning, there is solace in knowing that others read my words, that I have somehow shared my sadness without actually having to ask for permission. I apologize for the passive aggressive nature of my sorrow, but I suppose, in some ways, this is how I reach out. I have never found asking for help to be an easy task. The thought at one time used to frighten me into vocal paralysis.

Introversion is a difficult mistress and she will ride you hard and put you away wet if you allow her the indignity of that indiscretion.

But to broach these feelings alone, in the solace of my small writer’s world? Not happening any time soon, I’m afraid.

So for now I lean closer and listen to the whispers of my newest muse. She’s already made her story known to me, but I’m listening for those little clues that will lead me closer to understanding her in ways that will let me give her a proper home. Perhaps she will finally be the story I complete this year. One never knows…

In scanning through recent posts here at the lair, I realized that my presence has been relatively weak as of late. It’s not as though I haven’t been around. I’ve had things to say about little things: books, DVDs, lost memories rekindled for a smile. But larger thoughts have gone silent in my mind. I feel as though my safety zone has become my own personal Twitter feed: limited to 140 characters, if I can even muster that many.

Truth is, I feel as though I’m skirting the perimeter of my life right now. Things continue in my mental absence, but my focus is such at the moment that I can’t be bothered to acknowledge any of it. It’s why my inbox is filled with messages from friends and ImagiFriends^TM alike…and I can’t seem to focus enough to respond to any of them. Not with the depth they deserve. I’m not going to use this as an all-purpose generic way of responding, though. I will write back. I will.

And I will find my focus again. Right now, though, it feels too ephemeral, like spun sugar melting on the tip of my tongue. So I stop trying to reach what has decided to elude me. I let the muses in my mind go silent. Silence has never bothered me. It’s the clatter that presses against that silence that worries me. So I reinforce the silence with silliness. Like ordering a Wonder Woman T-shirt because I remember spinning with abandon as a wee pup, laughing and wishing more than anything for an invisible jet of my own. Or hanging Vulcan ears in the stairwell because I know they’ll make me smile every time I pass them.

Or watching YouTube clips from EastEnders and trying to piece together the puzzle of the delightfully disturbed Slater family because…well, because even in the excessive way of most soap operas (even the ones from Jolly Old England), there’s something there. Something intrinsically beautiful, especially in the fractured, fragile bond between Kat and Zoe, a mother/daughter relationship that, if nothing else, does indeed put the “fun” in “dysfunctional.” Besides, when all is said and done, love and family trump all else and, as Kat tells Zoe, “…it don’t matter. None of it. Because there’s a line, and it goes from me to you.”

Yeah. Not really hard to understand my sudden obsession with those wacky Slaters when you look at it that way.

I miss her every day. Every breath. With a severity that ebbs and flows, but always returns to the shoreline. I don’t say that often, but in my mind it feels like it’s all that I say, all that I do.

I saw my dad for Father’s Day weekend, the first time I’d seen him since I was there for her funeral. It was like seeing a person for the first time after an amputation. There was something missing, something gone that will never be replaced. It’s not like I’d never seen him without my mom around. We’d been on our own many times before, through all the myriad hospital stays she’d undergone since I was 10.

But those were like fractures to the bone, broken but with the promise of healing. In time. This time, the bone was sliced clean through, and all that was left were phantoms of what was once there.

Phantom pains and phantom presence.

My dad told me that, not long after my mom’s death, a squirrel appeared in the little wooded space behind their house. In the 6 years that my parents have lived where they are now, none of us had ever seen a squirrel there. It was always one of my mom’s disappointments. She loved squirrels. The house is still filled with all the squirrel paraphernalia she’d acquired through the years, either on her own or as gifts.

I remember the short period of time in which we had a squirrel as a “pet.” It had survived a fall from the nest when it was still too young to even have opened its eyes. My dad found it, brought it in, and we cared for it, squeezing formula into its tiny mouth with an eyedropper and keeping it in a shoebox until my dad could build it a cage from lumber scraps and chicken wire.

When it grew a little bigger, we realized “it” was a “she.” We named her Peepers, and for a while, she became part of the family. I can still see my mom standing in the square of sunlight from the kitchen window, washing something off in the sink while Peepers sat on her shoulder.

I don’t know how to process the appearance of the squirrel in their yard now that she’s gone. It’s a bit much for my overly rational side to try to assign it to anything more than just coincidence. But that portion of my soul that cries out to believe in the fantastical and the unexplained, the part that cherishes the message of undying love in books like To Dance With the White Dog…that part of me wants to believe that it’s more.

My dad seemed content to believe. And so that will be enough for me for now. That and Wonder Woman shirts and EastEnders clips and Vulcan ears and whatever else is required to extend the silence between the silliness and the clatter.

The radio traffic reporter called me “honey bunny” this morning.

Okay, not me specifically. It was all part of her goofy on-air banter, her way of making her usually dismal news to us groggy Beltway commuters a little less soul-crushing. As much as I loathe my commute, I always love listening to her.

Truth is, the traffic report is pretty much all I can stand listening to anymore. Everything else sounds jumbled, confusing, off-key. Podcasts wash over me, the words trickling through the cracks in my concentration and flowing away without leaving any trace of their passing. Music? Dissonant and irritating, like pebbles stuck inside my shoes.

So I drive in silence most of the time, and I keep my brain from straying to places I’m not yet ready to go by watching the world as it zooms past Sammy’s windows. This morning it was all the joggers. Like the lovely older Asian man who jogs with the precision of Swiss watches. It’s not just his predictable punctuality but his movements as well. Strides perfectly measured, syncopated arm swings, even the towel always tucked around his neck seems to flop in pre-planned rhythm.

Or the gaggle of college girls crowding others to the side as they dominated the sidewalk, trotting along like sun-dappled mares with their upswept ponytails swinging in hypnotic unison.

It’s enough to make me wish once more that I jogged. Only problem is that my knees and back used to play softball in high school. I suppose the rest of me played as well…but my knees and back still remember those years the most. Still feel those years.

Sometimes I miss playing softball. I’d like to think I was good at it. I won a few awards from those years and when I was finished, I’d made it to shortstop, which I’ve been told is a pretty important position. Really, though, I played because it was in my blood. One of the first gifts I remember receiving was a whiffle ball and bat set and a little lefty glove from my three aunts, two of whom played on various softball teams for most of my childhood.

And then there were the hours that my mom and I spent playing catch. Even when there was very little else we could do together without tempers and tensions flaring, this was our oftentimes silent truce. I can still see our gloves in the hall closet, her full-sized righthander’s leather glove with my little pee-wee league lefty glove nestled inside it.

I remember how, for my birthday after the first year I made the school softball team, she had my dad drive her all over the place (this was well before the days of Sports Authority or Modell’s), trying to find a new lefty glove for me. She wanted to make sure I was ready for the next season, ready with a grown-up glove to finally replace the one I’d been using since 2nd grade.

I can still smell that clean, new leather, still feel the supple give of the grain as I slipped my hand into the glove for the first time. I stopped keeping my glove in the hall closet. Instead, it stayed in my room, usually with a softball tucked into it to keep its shape. I’d oil it regularly and often sit in my computer chair in the evenings, absentmindedly tossing a ball into the glove as I watched television. During softball season, I was very rarely without that glove on my hand.

It was around this point that my mom stopped wanting to play catch. My throws, even when I tried to moderate them, were too hard, too fast, and she was too proud to admit this. So she simply stopped playing.

I remember not long after I moved out, I was visiting my parents and needed to look for something in the hall closet. I happened to look down and there was my mom’s glove, still sitting at the top of the junk bucket, empty except for the dusting of cobwebs across the ball pocket. Too many years had passed by that point, but I still remember wishing that I’d had my glove with me, that we could go play catch once more.

I never saw her glove again after that. I’m not sure what happened to it after my parents moved a few years ago, although I strongly suspect that my dad might have tossed it during their pre-move cleanout. He views sports equipment with a special disdain usually reserved for politicians or fundamentalists (not hard to imagine I’m his daughter, eh?).

Perhaps I’ll ask him where her glove is next time I visit. Perhaps by then I’ll be back to listening to music and podcasts. Perhaps by then even innocent random observations won’t lead me down the very pathways I’d been trying to avoid through the observations. Perhaps.