A Lesson in Solitude

From August 2002 to August 2003, I learned that a lover of solitude can only take so much of it. I spent many days within the confines of my studio apartment periodically peeping out the blinds at strange noises or pacing the 5-foot space allowed by our furnishings. I was in a foreign world but wasn't in it at all. This is what I wrote:

View From A First-Floor Balcony

These are my Emily Dickinson months—
Sitting alone and writing from an upstairs
Window—peering out onto a scene
That never changes.
I’m feeling crazy—
A bit depressed—and perhaps, somewhat
Smug: for I am Ruler of this
View from a first-floor balcony—
A hermit opera-queen that frowns
Upon the world below. And in
My solo—I wonder where the notes
Will go—for if I keep on singing
songs inside these walls alone—
I’ll only hear the echoes—which is when—
I think—my head explodes.
Then I’ll be dead. —And all my songs
Discovered, sung—and what good then?
I should be forced to say, "That is
Not it at all, That is not what I meant,
At all." But better late than never—
As they say—and better known
As crazy dead than never known
At all.
So I sit—imagining I’m Emily
And inventing fates better and worse.
I’m part Mr. Arthur, part Elizabeth the First.
So through these months, I’ll sing my songs—
Wondering where the notes will go.
© 2003

Since that time, I have moved from the sometimes-cozy-sometimes-suffocating studio to a spacious-enough 907 square-foot condo. And I've realized something. Though I've longed for more space to move about in, to think freely in, to sit quietly in--and have gotten it--I am still locked up inside my head, "wondering where the notes will go." I've never been one starved for human contact, but whuddaya know...I am now. So here are my thoughts, people. Let me know where they're going.