Solitude

[walbourn]

"but I remember my name in your mouth
and I don't think I was done hearing it close to my ear
on a whisper's way to a moan

pavlov hits me with more bad news every time I answer the phone
so I play and I sing and just let it ring,
all day when I'm at home

a defacto choice of
macro-microcosmic melancholy
but baby any way you slice it,
I'm thinkin I could just as soon use the time alone"
-- Serpentine, Ani Difranco


I've spent a long time living alone. appleang and I separated in February 1999, and I've spent the bulk of my nights alone since then. For a long while, I think it was for the best. I was a mess, and nobody deserved to be around someone as deeply in the clutches of depression as I was at the time.

There are things about the freedom of living alone I take for granted. The house is kept the way I want it--with occasional randomization from Koshka. I eat out when I want to eat out, and cook what I want to cook. I watch TV shows I want when I want. I stay up, go to bed, wake up largely based on my own whims--subject to employability naturally. My money, my time, and life is my own.

But in all that time, I've always had this nagging in the back of my brain that my time is being wasted.

Happiness is largely based on having close relationships and goals. Somewhere along the line, my only goals were really having close relationships. I've never had big dreams for myself. I'm happy to have a career that I enjoy and that pays me well. Perhaps it came too naturally to me for me to value it highly enough, although intellectually I know most people struggle to find such a career their whole life. I've met many of my the expected goals in life, and I'm unsure how I feel about the ones I haven't. The fruits of many of my labors have come, been savored, and have faded.

What now?

That's the question I ask myself in the solitude of my nights alone. The answer never seems to come, so I go through the motions of hobbies, distractions, and the mind-numbing of entertainment within easy reach.

In those years of depression, I knew what I wanted and knew I had lost it. Now I no longer obsess over things lost, but don't have the slightest clue what it is I really want. Vague notions sure, but nothing concrete.

The truth is though that I think I felt the same sense of dissatisfaction when I did have full-time partnerships in my life. Maybe it's just the human condition to wish for things we don't have, and not pay as much attention to what we do have in the meantime.

It just felt better having someone around to share with. Even when life's a mess, I sleep better having someone to hold.