This Weekend I Thought about the Meaning of Loneliness, and I Wrote This.

Everyone has a great fear in life. Mine is loneliness. Naturally our great fear is usually the one most important to overcome to reach our life’s dreams. I am a writer. Writers spend a lot of time alone writing. Also, being an artist in our society makes us lonely. Everyone else leaves in the morning for work and structured jobs. Artists live outside that built-in social system.
–Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones

I am sitting on my salmon-pink couch in the one bedroom apartment that I share with my boyfriend, Dan. Everything but the couch is beige. That’s a slight exaggeration- we have paintings on the walls, two bright blue yoga balls, and Dan’s nearly-neon-green New Vermont Republic flag hangs above his desk. But the carpet, the walls, the La-Z-Boy chair, even the kitchen table… beige. These objects melt together in the corners of my eyes and blur into empty space. Outside, the walls of the apartment building are a slightly yellow-tinged beige. The sky is a glowing robin’s egg without a cloud in sight. The deep green landscaped bushes reach tall. The maple trees stand bare, red-toned naked branches stretch up toward the bright sun that is absolutely hidden from my view.

This apartment has no direct sunlight in the winter. But then,  that isn’t so bad when “winter” equals 56 degrees at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, allowing me to walk outside in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt and soak in the sun anywhere I darn well please.  Yet I can’t seem to will myself outdoors again. This morning, I went for my first run in over a month. My legs were lead weights from all the holiday cookies. With every pitter-patter step, my love handles bounced so dramatically that I fantasized about sports-bras designed for side fat. I came home with my thighs shaking, preparing to eat a bear for breakfast. One of Dan’s sweetest gestures is his insistence on cooking breakfast as often as I’ll let him. Unfortunately, he rolled out of bed at 6:00 this morning to join a community hiking trip to a canyon in Columbus, Georgia, so that was out of the question. I spooned out some yogurt.

Last night, when Dan reminded me of today’s excursion, my chest and throat tightened. I swallowed a scream and instead made an obnoxious number of pouty faces whenever he mentioned his canyon- adventure to which I had missed the online registration window. Today, I have spent a good deal of my time pacing and thinking “I should go for my own hike!” or “I’d like to check out the park in Roswell.” But something has stopped me each time- my shaky legs, sneezing fits from my now more-than-a-week-long-though-receding flu, an overwhelming desire to lie down on the floor… all the while I’ve thought to myself “if only Dan were home!” If Dan were home, and I said I wanted to go to the park in Roswell, or drive by the apartments we looked at on Craigslist, or go for a leisurely walk up Sawnee Mountain, one of two things would happen. Either he would exclaim “Yeah, let’s go!” and begin to pack a bag, bursting my lazy-inertia-bubble. Or, he would shrug and say “maybe” and putter around his computer until I forgot about the idea and began writing.

The difference between scenario two and what I’m doing right now is that Dan’s very presence, bouncing on his cobalt-blue yoga ball and staring at his computer screen, his back turned to me while I tap away on my laptop and lean against a salmon-pink cushion, allows me to check out with half of my brain. At any moment, we could both stop working and make love or eat popcorn or have an epic Bananagrams championship. This knowledge is a tether that I use to avoid the present, to avoid unearthing something radical in myself. Of course, much of the time Dan and I open to our truths together. These moments are the real meaning of our relationship. But when I’m not careful, I use Dan as a distraction from myself.  It is the very danger I feared when I was younger and refused committed partnerships so I could “discover me.” But self-discovery does not end in high school or college or even our mid-twenties. Self-discovery is not contingent on singlehood or partnership or writing or not writing or going to the park or not going to the park. All these actions I fear for what they may teach me about myself and for what I may have to feel in order to learn. The only options I ever truly have are to be present or not- whether I am alone, or with Dan, at home, or in a canyon. If I am present, I will be forced to move through my feelings. Even on the days when those feelings are tired, shaky, insecure, and lonely, I will discover myself on the other side.