"Write," she instructed.
So he did. He wrote. He wrote of many things, and when he was done, he presented the neatly bound typewritten pages to her. She didn't even look at them.
"Write more."
He wrote more. He wrote of how he felt when the sun in the afternoon cast dappled lines across the floor. He wrote about prison bars and he wrote about prison food. He wrote about her, and how her dark hair was short and clipped above her ears. He wrote about how her brown eyes pierced his soul and tore him apart and all he could do was write the pieces back together again.
When he was done, he did not show her. Still, she told him, "Keep writing."
He did not know how she knew. Perhaps it was his eyes. They were misty. Perhaps there was a mark on his fingers, an ink mark, that denoted him as a writer who had wrote. She had always been so perceptive. So he wrote a murder mystery. It wasn't as hard as it seemed. And then he kept writing. The blank page came alive. He wrote adventures. He wrote thrillers. He wrote realistic fiction. He wrote history.
As a rule, he avoided romances. They hit too close to home.
And always, there was her. He caught her in glimpses in his stories. She appeared around the edge of doorways, unexplained. She was a blur across a moving street. She saved a man from drowning in sorrow, only to disappear.
Write.