On Being Alone

I always thought I wanted to be alone, but as it turns out, I really just want to be alone with the person I love.  I want US to be alone TOGETHER.  I want to have someone to come home to and to wake up with and to go to bed with and to make meals with and to make love to and listen to music with and to wander around with and to sit and just be still with. 

I don’t want people to intrude on the intimate moments of my life.  Not the sexually intimate moments, but the moments when I just want to be surrounded by my backyard or engulfed in my music.  I don’t want neighbors who stare at me when I’m outside, and I certainly don’t want to be guilted into spending time with people who think they can impose their idea of “friendliness” or “family” on me simply because social norms indicate that people should portion out their time to others in a false sense of “togetherness”. 

Life is so short and yet so unbearably long.  The good times fly past, and the painfully boring and tense and work-based times stretch themselves out over eons of time and fill my brain with vast sinkholes of anxious WAITING.  Waiting for a good moment, waiting to spend time with someone, waiting to FEEL something solid and strong and beautiful. 

You see, I’m very bad at making the time which I spend alone in my head productive.  I want to play the guitar or work out or nap, but my brain won’t shut off and it won’t shut up.  My thoughts wander to “what if?” and “why not?” and when?”.  I have a hard time just BEING.  If there was a drug that gave me inner peace, I’d inject it every day, even if my life span was subsequently shortened by a dozen years.  Better to spend my days reveling than to spend them worrying about things I can’t really control.  But my brain actively works against me in this capacity. 

I want to build a fortress in my backyard, so I don’t have to see or hear anyone who lives around me.  I want to be actually, physically alone, without interference from people who have not been invited into my life.  I want to live in the middle of nowhere, so long as I have the one I love living in solitude with me.  No one else – except by invitation. 

If only he wanted the same thing.  But I guess we can’t control how other people feel or when they will act or how they will respond to us.  People are strange, and I am a stranger.  Even to myself.