ALONE part one

(I wrote this in late June, or started it then, and finished it (?) on Monday. I hit publish but forgot to change the date so it went deep into the pages. I am re-publishing it now with a new date. Which is hard. Because this is some thinky, very personal, thinky shite...)

When I was a kid, we lived in a house edged by a pond with swampy woods surrounding it. I played there for hours alone. Sometimes, I played there with neighbor kids or friends from school, but never for long: I needed them to agree with my secret swamp world exactly.

That fallen tree? That’s my magic horse. This raised grassy lump? A tuffet for the Queen. I was (literally) a team player in every other part of my kid life, but in my woods? It was either play in my world as I did, or I would live there alone.

I was bossy. Weird and bossy. And I didn't mind playing alone.

I never minded being punished to my room: there were no distractions there. When my friends had grown beyond my make-believe world in the woods, and after I pretended that I had too, I sometimes snuck out to that grassy tuffet. I dreamt poems there and stories I still haven't told. I loved that mossy throne; it was comforting. There was just the snap and shake of the trees in the wind there, just the flap of goose wings or ripples from turtles on the water. There was nothing else, no one else but me and a day dream.

It was the beginning of a long romance. Solitude and day dreams are both charming seducers.

I got my first Walkman when I was 12. I was losing my fearless self to boobs and puberty and what would become the beginning of a slew of self-doubts. The headphones let me disappear with the Beach Boys and Ramones and Elvis Costello. When I learned not to sing the words out loud while plugged in, I realized I could be perfectly (confidently) alone and in the room at the same time. When I was 17, booze did the same thing.

Now? Not much has changed.

I covet the space I make, though these days it requires building barriers that are achingly harder to create and come with more consequences. The answering machine is my armor, but sometimes, I make shields of sunglasses and excuses -- forgetfulness or the busy-busy of life. When push comes to shove, I hide behind the gilded mesh of cheap beer. I'm pushing off and away for sure, just not to some fantastic kingdom of my own making. Just off and away.

My building of moats is ruled by the same master I met when I was a kid: I still have a need to be alone, to shake off life by getting quiet in my own space. But the ditch digging I do as an adult? It's driven by a master who now has two heads.

I know well the difference between alone and lonely as I have felt both, so when I say that the adult and mother I have become needs to be separate and silent and all by herself sometimes, I am speaking a bitter truth but one I can swallow. It's when I realize that my absences are more than just a "room of one's own," re-charging kind of thing but also the symptom of a (life-long?) dread of being boring or unfunny or lazy or dull... Well, that's when I begin to see the master as more of a monster.

The Kid understands this of me (as well as he can), but my children do not. They are however old enough to question why I stay behind sometimes when they go out to dinner or why I just "let it go to voicemail," so I know they wonder about it. I know I make people I love lonely for me; sometimes I have trumped their feelings for my own. I am surely old enough to know better, but, sometimes “knowing” is not enough.

Sometimes the desperate need to be alone -- to be back atop that tuft in the woods, quiet enough to hear my own voice talking back to me through the swamp and the skunk cabbage without the worry of talking out loud or being that person I think (they think) I am -- sometimes that desire beats out every good and righteous one in me.

To be continued...