And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you…

It was still the greatest ever finishing line for a song. Ever. From the moment he’d heard Tom’s beautiful illuminations illustrating to him such a powerfully touching story, he had set the goal of paying homage to it somehow in his writing.

Now was the time. That one assemblage of words tempting him, nay, taunting him, from the top of the empty document open on his flat-screen monitor before him.

The hardest part about using a prompt that one knows so intimately is that one’s imagination is “tainted” by the story it has come from, by the context of it that will not be permitted to escape the reservoir of creativity within the writer yearning to publically pay tribute.

How is it possible that I can be so affected by one piece of music or writing that my imagination is unable to manifest a new story? The idea was as shocking to him as it was paradoxically appropriate.

It occurred to him to ask his wife Martha if she had any ideas…