Cat Jacobi

By Catherine Jacobi | Fiction | Short Story | 2025

There was a time when my name meant something in a boy’s mouth.

He’d say it slow, like an ellipsis, like I was a thought he hadn’t quite finished having. I was the girl behind the poem, behind the painting, behind the spiral. The girl in the back of the grainy photo, chin tilted up, cigarette staged, mascara smudged like a memory. Not the art—but the moment before it. The ache that made him write.

I used to be the muse. Capital-M. The kind they name albums after. The kind who gets thanked at the end of novels she never read. “To the girl who lit the match,” they’d write. As if I hadn’t also been standing there when everything burned.

It was always the same type of boy: sad, soft-spoken, devastatingly mid. He’d play Leonard Cohen on vinyl and tell me I looked like I didn’t belong in this century. (As if that were a compliment. As if I hadn’t spent 40 minutes doing my hair to look “accidentally mythic.”) They loved to call me an enigma, but only when they weren’t brave enough to ask real questions. I learned to keep my mouth shut. That’s what muses do. We pose. We haunt. We leave before the chorus.

Once, a boy said I was his Ophelia. I told him she drowned. He said, “Exactly.” I laughed like that was romantic. It wasn’t. It never was.

Being a muse sounds glamorous until you realize you’re a prop in someone else’s self-mythologizing. An accessory to a man’s becoming. I was always “the girl who made him feel something,” never the girl who felt things first. My tears made him write; his made him genius.

He’d write about how I ruined him. How I “slipped through his fingers like wine” or “tasted like nicotine and regret.” I read those lines now and wonder if he ever actually saw me—or if I was just a mirror that cried back.

One of them went viral for a tweet about heartbreak. Another did a short film where the lead character wore my old leather jacket and said lines I told him in bed. Another became a father and named his daughter after me. I think that was supposed to be sweet. It just made me feel ancient.

I don’t get invited to gallery shows anymore. The poems aren’t about me. The new girls have wet hair and silver jewelry and a talent for silence. Good for them. I hope they learn to run faster than I did.

I’m not bitter. Just… archived. Soft-launched into obsolescence. No one wants to hear from the muse when she gets older. What do we do with the woman who’s already been immortalized? There’s no aesthetic for that.

I still keep the letters. The voice memos. The sketches and the songs. Not because I want him back—god, no—but because sometimes I need proof that I was once that girl. That once, someone looked at me and saw a whole universe worth unraveling.

Now? I write my own songs. I make my own art. I am no one’s origin story but my own. I don’t inspire men anymore. I unsettle them.

But sometimes, late at night, I scroll through his feed. He’s still writing poems. Still pretending he invented sadness. And there’s a girl in the background of one photo. She looks like me. Or at least the version of me he remembers. Pretty. Quiet. Sad enough to be interesting. I hope she gets out before she becomes a metaphor.

Anyway. That’s all I wanted to say. Consider this my rebrand: muse gone rogue. From “his greatest regret” to “her own damn legacy.” No credits, no dedications, no men.

Just me.