"Boy, she's squawky," I thought as I watched North Philadelphia blast out in front of me from the window of our subway car, though I thanked the stars through the heavy rain clouds above us that her phone was broken. I guess she always had the hungry-bird affect to her speech, but she used to occasionally talk about literature, or I guess it would be more accurate to say, "the ideas in literature."

As I get older, the places my imagination can exercise itself freely become fewer and fewer. The time when old cellars were cavernous dungeons filled with danger and mystery, when the shore was an infinite, replenishing oasis, is swiftly waning (despite my best efforts to retain these perceptions). I wondered if Ali was experiencing something similar, which might explain why she was taking so many different jobs and working herself to exhaustion. The growing hole I tried vainly to fill with more stories, more ideas, more fantasies, she was filling with career goals and editorial work, spackling the hole up with her résumé.

With this in mind, the part of the Poe House that pleased me most was its bareness.

There were no Disney-like reproductions or oblong plaques littered about, just bare rooms, a couple tattered leaflets, and a giant metal raven stretching its wings across the yard.

There are virtually no artifacts or original works of any kind; the entirety of the house can be viewed in fifteen minutes or so. However, the appeal of the house is not its information or memorabilia, but its presence. Spring Garden Street is remarkably ugly: trash scurries down the sidewalk like an ignored rodent infestation and every building is processed to a mold suited for indeterminable progress. The Poe House sits in the middle of this, like the last remaining oasis, spiting its surroundings.

As my noisy sidekick and I walked through the garden, I thought about what could be done to make this house more popular. When we rapped at the chamber door a ranger, the only other person in the house, answered. Personally I would not touch one cracked wall of the house, but for the sake of its continued preservation, I began to think this:

Somewhere in Florida, as I recalled from my high school days as a Beat-philac, there is one of the homes in which Jack Kerouac stayed, which is open to writers as a sort of guesthouse where they may draw from the residual fallout of creative aura seeping out of the walls left from Kerouac's presence and use it to write their own work—or something like that. Could this not also be used in the Poe House? A couple of cots, a few lanterns, a nice legal consult who could loop around health code restrictions–the Poe House could become "The Poe Writer's House."

Perhaps it is true what these contemporary writers say about writing, that one writes because he can do nothing else – that a "true" writer is bound to his typewriter, or notebook, or laptop. So presumably a change in scenery is of no use to him—he either is a writer, or he is not. But to me, a writer is not some romanticized fate. I often wish to dissolve the separation of the "writer" and "the one who writes" when we look at the value of writing.

As for the subliminal hierarchy between my "side kick" and I: while she considers me her "literary companion," the relationship itself possesses a bit of irony; for though this friendship is accurately represented, she is the editor of a literary magazine for which I once worked, and a manager of the journal for which I currently write. Paradoxically, my resistance to the "writer's" paradigm in which she holds a greater status does in some way elevate my status in her mind within it.

But I began to notice a subtle change in her; talks of due dates, failing co-workers, and sermons about responsibility began to dry on her tongue until such things were no longer spoken. Her expression was no longer contorted in agitation, and she spoke with the excitement of a young girl with wide-eyes to match, as I imagine she did when she was a child or when she was alone in her room reading poetry.

An individual's personality is not constant, nor do I think it "evolves" in the manner in which many people describe. To me, it is more a matter of rising and falling, waxing and waning. And as we walked into Poe's cellar, I remembered this passage from "The Black Cat," inspired by the very basement in which we were standing:

"I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect anything suspicious."

She could be forever frozen in wonder, never again be trapped under the burden of the mechanical truths of an arbitrary existence. Nevermore to—

It was time to go look at the rest of the house and we had to get back so that we wouldn't miss class. But to think, if the museum was a writer's house, maybe I could have completed my thought...