Let Me Just Say This About That
by Chef Troy
For as long as I can remember, I've loved to be alone. In military school I rarely got the chance to indulge that love, which made the times I did manage to achieve solitude that much more precious. There were times I risked hypothermia in a bitter cold Missouri winter night so I could walk all the way out to the middle of the football field (which was way out on the edge of campus) and lay in the snow in the very center, staring up at the crystal fire of the stars. No lights around to dim the faint ones into invisibility, no sound but the quiet cornstarch creak of the snow beneath me, nobody around but me and the sky. After a moment, it was almost like I was floating toward them. As noted philosopher Cyndi Lauper says, "until it ends, there is no end."
In college one of my favorite things to do was walk the lonely sidewalks with my pea coat collar raised partway and listen to Dire Straits on my walkman. Especially the songs "Your Latest Trick" and "Brothers in Arms." I imagined an impenetrable force field sealing me hermetically into myself, a field that rendered me perfectly alone. If no one could get in, they couldn't affect me and then leave, so I could never be lonely. Loneliness gnaws one's bones but solitude preserves them.
In the years since then I have learned to appreciate the company of others, and I am considered outgoing and fun to be with. I genuinely like it, but still the siren song of solitude whispers in the corners of my mind. I stay up late every night and get less sleep than I should, just to know that I am the only conscious person in the house. I take the trash out and on the way back to the house I stand in the back yard for a timeless moment, arms outspread, and raise my face to the darkening sky, looking for geese to fly away with.
Then I turn from the cool blue dark and look in at the warm light of my home, and go back to life away from solitude. Life with a woman who doesn't understand my desire to be alone AT ALL, and (I think) resents it, but accepts it.
It's not so bad. It has its good points.
And tomorrow there will be another bag of trash to take out.
One kind of solitude I don't care for, gentle readers, is the solitude we find in the mail bag here at "Teemings." I want to encourage you to comment on the submissions you read here - we want to know what you think. Did you like something you read here? Tell us. Did something you read here make you mad? TELL US. We are all a bunch of major attention hounds here and we live for feedback, so feed us!