Alone

I am slowly discovering what it means to be alone with your dreams. I haven't been this alone since my early 20s, when everything was tortured and simple and wrought with danger and possibility. So much has changed within me, but mostly time has passed, my time, and I can feel each day like the running down of a meter. My life.

I am not afraid of the alone. I like it. I keep my own unpredictable hours, my idiosycratic habits, my wet towels and stone cold mugs of over-steeped tea. I am never bored, and not really lonely. But sometimes the vastness of my own life looms cavernous around me and I am cowed by all that I am, all that I must do, and the fear, of course, of missing that gold ring as it comes around again. How many chances do we get? Will I even know it when it comes? What is it? What am I here to do?

I have run from this mission for so long. Hidden in the warm, uncomplicated embrace of past loves, most of them unworthy. I knew on some level all along that they were mostly there to protect me from myself. The enormity of this space in which I now sit. I did not have the tools to navigate in the dark, I had not submitted to the tyger. I would have done anything to hide from myself.

But no more. I want to be here. I want to be here in this difficult place and I want to find out what it is, what it really is. I have to focus, breathe, be here. I have to discover what it means to live in the forest of the night.