Then there were the songs. I would hear him letting out beats and prisons in the quiet of his self-imposed exile. Freeing himself from a world that would surely drown him otherwise. And I felt tantalizingly liberated in my invisibility. Hiding in plain sight for he was entirely blind in those days.

I dreaded the day when he would regain his sight. Fearful that the songs would end and I would be left with a lump of flesh no longer recognizable.

And just like blindness, cheating the shadows of light, he would use his percipient interpretations to create a world all his own, that everyone found familiar once in view. Shouting his politics. Whispering his ideologies that were compellingly anachronistic. Somehow folding you into his perfectly flawed Utopia. Contradictions and all. Finding a safety you know does not exist, yet you are willingly deceived.

And this was the beauty of his gift.

I took to calling him Orpheus when I knew he could not hear me. Screaming his name across continents. Subjecting myself to profound humiliation in hopes of hearing just one more creation. One more composition to assuage my muses.

Though there is a good deal of distance between us now, I am still in tune with his working art. It persuades me from my indolence at times when movement seems oppressive and challenges my complacency.

I only hope a man so blind should never see again.