Dear Stephen Harper:

Don't fuck up.

Sincerely,

~SQ

Weather: cold, snowless

Solitude

This morning, I watched the world get light between snoozes on a 7 a.m. bus home from Boyfriend's city. I hate mornings and I hate Greyhound, and I was supposed to come home last night, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Because I knew a dark apartment was waiting for me back here. Because I couldn't handle the thought of shuffling around in slippers, watching some TV in the shadows, feeling the emptiness of the room imprinting itself on me like some kind of a brand. The Empty One. Usually when I'm here alone I walk around flicking on light switches, all of them; I turn on the TV, or maybe my music, loud enough to be heard from the common room; I sit on the couch and bathe in my artificial defiance of darkness and silence. It doesn't really help all that much. So I chose uncomfortable sleep and watching blue light dawn on frozen fields, which, actually? Didn't help all that much either.

An unsettling realization for a new year: It's hard for me to be alone.

Perhaps if I were a little smarter, or a little quicker off the mark with my noticing, I would have realized this sooner. Even now I'm sure all four people who are reading this are wondering why this is even worth mentioning. Many people dread being alone. But that never used to be me, or at least I don't think it did. Didn't I used to crave alone-time? Didn't I used to spend hours holed up in my room with books/journals/craft projects/imaginary friends? (Didn't I used to know whether or not "Didn't I used to" was an appropriate construction? It sure as heck looks wrong....) It used to be a red-letter occasion when my parents went out and left me home alone. I could blast music from my room and leave the door of the bathroom open so I could hear it while I took a bath and go from the bath back to my bedroom without getting dressed first. Wasn't that fun? Maybe I was just trying to live loud enough to make up for the missing people. It seemed fun at the time.

But that was before --
-before I started living with three other girls almost all the time
-before I realized that people could make as good friends as books, no really
-before I learned how to speak and act and dance and sing and enjoy myself in front of/beside/with other people
-before I had any idea of what it is to have someone in your life that you actually want to be close to all the time. Someone you want to sleep with and wake up with. Someone it physically hurts to leave.

So now...what? The pendulum swings and I'm a quivering mess at the earliest opportunity? This seems unfair. Unfair but true. I'm afraid that I'm becoming the kind of person who doesn't know who she is unless there are other people around for her to bounce her personality off of, and I don't want this to become me. I don't want to be consumed with doubt, and fear, and the unbearable heaviness of having to create a scaffolding of an identity for myself, the first minute I'm left alone. I don't know what sorts of ugly thought and emotion patterns have infected me to bring this about. I'm fairly sure I used to know who I was, and that I used to know it better when I was alone.

I have the unfortunate impression, though, that whatever they are, they're not actually all that ugly -- that they're the same things that have made me more social, more outgoing, more friendly. It's like I can be extroverted, or sure of myself, but not both. Why can't I like the lights and still not be afraid of the dark?

I hate to end this on a cheesy question like that, but I have night class, and if I skip another one Ferns will have my head.

~SQ