Setting the guitar aside, she sat staring at the blank white page in front of her. Songwriting had seemed like such a fun idea but when it came down to it, it was hard work like everything else. Now that she had a record deal, the romance was gone, and the relationship between herself and her music felt like it had been stripped down to the sinews, with nothing between her and failure but the thread of confidence extended from the recording studio.
She'd felt this way before, when? Reflecting back, she flipped through memories one by one until she hit upon it. They were sitting on his bed, she and her first boyfriend, after a couple months of dating, when he looked at her and said, I love you. No you don't, she said immediately. She didn't mean it to be rude, it was just honest. You don't even know me. It turned out that it was far easier to share her body than to offer up her soul for inspection.
That was when it occurred to her, a comment Joseph Campbell made about marriage. It's an ordeal. It has nothing to do with being happy. It has to do with being transformed. She picked the guitar back up and dropped her expectations of how the love affair with songwriting would unfold. Here was this moment, the music, herself. She was in this for the long haul.
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