Loneliness Monologue

A Love Letter for Linda

Rainy, cold Sunday morning here in Boulder. Perfect day to pull the bedspread up to my chin and drift off for another hour of sleep because I was writing way into the night.

This morning I reread the essay. I was not surprised that it was flotsam from ideas crashing together and jetsam from essays cast off for cause.

Command, A, delete… and it’s gone. Was it a waste of time? No, it was practice. Was there anything in it to salvage? No, nothing that would lead to another essay.

Today I want to write something quiet that doesn’t involve ranting about politics, or worrying about the future of my country, or anything semi-serious such as a recent essay on death, (The Last Great Adventure, May 11 post on Mountain Passages on Substack) that got more responses than anything I’ve written for the past 8 months.

Sorry, that was a humble brag. When I posted it, I guessed that I’d get less than 300 views. The essay got more than 500 views.

I’m abusing the keyboard this morning in a sort of upstream dog paddle straining for an essay idea worth posting this evening. Rambling, because Blue Eyes has been gone to Italy for two weeks with her best friend Kerry and I am missing her today.

Loneliness isn’t a word much discussed among men. It is considered a weakness. To show loneliness is to show dependency, a lack of strength, a slowing of motion, and an uncertainty going forward. Complete manosphere bullshit. Loneliness is missing a part of your life that has gone away. While loneliness is a manifestation of love, it is also an exercise in self-pity. The former a good thing, the latter a waste of time.

Self-pity is just like worrying. It is a low form of thinking, a whirlpool in a tight passage, difficult to maneuver. Once I see it coming, I simply reject self-pity. I compensate for my loneliness with friends, the refrigerator, the garden, and Carly, our dog.

I’m in full agreement with the writer Paulo Coelho, “I've noticed that loneliness gets stronger when we try to face it down, but gets weaker when we simply ignore it.”

I find myself reaching out to friends every day. It may be just a text or an email but I’ll be damned if the only being I communicate with every day is Carly or a clerk at McGuckins Hardware. It’s curious too, how many friends I’ve seen for a coffee, or a meal, or bike ride.

Oddly enough, it seems like I have spent more time than usual with the refrigerator. Just before Blue Eyes left for Italy, I moved from writing in my easy chair to writing at the dining room table where I sit in a straight-backed chair and have a view of the Flatirons. The mountains center me, they always have.

My guess is the new proximity to the fridge has something to do with my more frequent visits.

But it is more an odd kind of comfort to scan the shelves when I reach a pause in the writing and need to think about something else for a moment…like a secret pint of gelato that Blue Eyes may have buried in the bottom of the freezer for me.

Just then I was searching around for a transition phrase or sentence for the next way I have compensated for loneliness. I stalled, so I got up, called Carly from the dog couch and we went out to inspect the garden. It’s hard to explain exactly how the garden focuses me at the expense of all the worries and the other nonsense that tumble around my small brain, including how to write an essay about mundane stuff such as loneliness, and keep you reading.

I open the gate and my eyes scan the raised beds like crew on the bow watching for rocks in shallow water.

Rabbits! The fricking rabbits have figured a way of getting into the garden by jumping off a rock wall through four inch wire fencing. My lettuce patch looks like something has taken a small mower to it.

I mumble bad words that Carly thinks might be pointed at her. She understands about 20 to 30 words, but “goddamn rabbits” are not two of those words. I assure her that the anger is not pointed at her as she blithely walks through the onion patch.

“Get out of the onions!” makes her scoot down to the gravel between the raised beds. She understands “Get Out.”

Research indicates that people who share their lives with another person or pet live longer, healthier lives. I’m lucky to have Blue Eyes to travel through time with, but also her dog Carly. To be clear, if Blue Eyes and I were both struggling in the water, Carly would toss the life ring to Blue Eyes first.

But in her absence, Carly has adopted me as her favorite person. She just came back from chasing rabbits in the back yard. She hates them too. Momentarily she will be back sleeping on the dog couch in the living room. If I get up, she follows me everywhere. At night, after I get myself tucked in, Carly does a couple circles at my feet and spoons with my legs. By morning, she has moved up to spoon along my chest. I get a big wet kiss to start the morning.

“The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself,” Mark Twain wrote.

I’m comfortable with my ways of ignoring loneliness—mostly.

END

This essay was written on the spur of moment and posted without the help of an editor. Forgive me my transgressions against the language. I had something on my mind that I wanted to share.

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