Free Where We Live and Die by Brian Keene Page B

published or be the dancing monkey and star attraction to impress all their friends and family members with at their next Christmas party. Fellow writers and peers, people I’d come up with, promised to do it together with, only to have them lose touch with me when I got successful.
    Or maybe it was me who lost touch with them. Maybe it was my own insecurities—my own guilt at achieving everything we’d all hoped for, while they still hadn’t. And maybe that applied to those old high school friends, as well. Maybe they were just proud of me, and I mistook that pride for something else. And maybe those childhood chums were right to be angry. Perhaps not all of our personal demons needed to end up as grist for my fiction mill. And maybe—just maybe—my two ex-wives had been right to expect me to choose a healthy relationship with them instead of fifteen hours at a keyboard living inside my own head seven days a week, instead of talking to them or living with them.
    Those were the thoughts that kept me awake some nights, and on those nights, I drank more whiskey and continued to write. It was a self-perpetuating vicious cycle. Lose everything because of writing until the only thing you have left is the writing itself. Rinse and repeat.
    But it’s too late to do anything about it now. And like I said, I’m good at it. So I have that going for me. And not everything has been lost. I have great relationships with both of my sons. My youngest is four, and even though his mother couldn’t be married to a writer any longer, we remain best friends and work well together as co-parents. My oldest is twenty-one, and although he’s a young man now, when I look at him I still see the little boy who read through his daddy’s comic book collection and played superheroes on my living room floor for hours and talked about how he was going to be a writer just like me when he grew up. Thank God and Cthulhu he didn’t. That desire lasted exactly one season when he was ten. Now he’s a senior at Penn State and studying to be a social worker. The pride and love I feel for him is as tangible as the lump I get in my throat when I think about how much he’s grown. He doesn’t talk about writing anymore, and for that I am grateful. I only hope that his younger brother does the same. My oldest son doesn’t read my books and his only association with them is when he goes to science fiction, fantasy, and horror conventions wearing a t-shirt with one of my book covers on it. When a cute girl approaches him and compliments the shirt and tells him they are a fan of my work, he smiles and says, “Yeah, he’s my dad.” I’m okay with this. I will probably never leave either of my sons a lofty inheritance, so the very least I can do is get them laid.
    My relationship with my girlfriend is good, too. Maybe that’s because we’re both writers. We know exactly what goes into this life of ours, and what the demands are. But I suspect that same knowledge is what keeps us from permanently cementing this relationship and making it official. Because we know that no matter how close we are, we’ll always have a laptop between us—or two laptops, in our case. Because we know that sooner or later, the good things will go away, leaving only fodder for the muse.
    Because that’s how the muse gets fed.
    In U2’s “The Fly,” Bono sings that every poet is a cannibal and every artist is a thief. They all kill their inspiration and then sing about the grief. Until last Saturday night, I believed this to be true.
    I know better now.
    It’s not the artist who kills their inspiration.
    It’s the inspiration that kills the artist.
     

    * * *
     

    The coffee had finished brewing but my brain and body were still sore. Worse, loneliness and isolation were still weighing on me. I could have reached out to someone. I could have called my girlfriend, or any of the other people I truly trust—a group whose members sadly dwindle with each passing year. But