On Being Alone

  7am.  I love this time of morning.  This too early mountain hour where you can step outside and hear the Earth gentle-crack her bones awake, creaking from age and from wear and inhaling with the sun's rise.  The Colorado mountains and that yellow sun wake up at the same time and birds flutter from their rubbed eyes.  It is much too cold to be in the treeline air, and a sin before God to stay indoors on mornings like these.  So my ears will be cold, but my fingers, drag racing blue ink on lined paper, will stay warm and stay awake and they will not numb with the chill because this is why you came here, Jamie.  This is why you come every time.  Now, write.

     The sun is not up yet, and the air is still colored that frostbite blue you only see with the daybreak snow.  But the pink is bleeding through the aspens now, grabbing onto clouds to climb up and up.  What an endeavor, to paint the entire sky, and all for the pleasure of the birds whispering good morning.

     Minutes spent like this, maybe more than minutes spent any other way at all, let me inside my own head.  The hinges are stuck with rust lately, and the door is heavy with no give.   I need a crowbar day.

     The state of being alone can be a complicated one, you know.  It turns the whole world into a silver-backed mirror and it forces you to look into your own eyes.  I don't always like what I find here.  Jesus, does anyone?  But lately, I have been made to wonder what exactly I would be looking at in those glare moments, and so here I am.  Two hours of sleep, one mug of instant coffee rapidly losing its warmth, a very cold set of ears, and a pen.  Waking up and creaking with the morning.  The light, the mountains and I bidding quiet how-do-you-dos to one another, as it has been too long and we are strangers again.

     Interesting, how the sun awakens a valley.  She stretches over the curve of the Earth to brush awake the peaks farthest from her.  The foothills and the floor get to sleep in, the lucky saps.

     So, here is a thing.  Here is a thing about being alone in one of the only places where I can truly just be alone.  I think I like it.

     I read through some old journals this week.  Not from nostalgia, but from curiosity.  I write these things and then it ends.  I rarely look back.  The simple, single act of writing everything down is the introspection I need, deeming the examination of it all wholly unnecessary in that moment.  When I write, it is to build a home for all the words battling for light inside my head.  They float down and they stick to paper like snowflakes and the fight melts off.

     So, I read through years of my life.  2006, when I met that one.  2009, when I forced him to let me go.  2009, when I returned, quite broken, to my treehouses and allowed them to get close enough to dress my wounds.  When I let that island save me for the second time.  2009, Greece.  2010, heartbeats and heartbreak.  2011, that jungle gym of an island, Dominica, dripping with passion fruit, hot springs and waterfalls the blood in its veins.  And I made some of those years sit in their shelves.  The tough ones.  The ones with claws hidden inside time-softened covers.  There are words that I do not need to see again, so the clawed journals can rest.

     But I found a theme in all of them.  No matter whose heart I was tangled into, there was one theme- being alone.  And not just for a moment.  Not for a small span of time, until my hand could find another to slide into, but alone.  As if I have always suspected that I might be meant for that.  Just for that.  And I'm not sure that it's a fate so pleading for resistance.

     I do not know that I am meant for anybody.  That there is a soul somewhere, bouncing off the sides of the universe, hoping to get close enough that the magnets meet.  Hoping to be drawn to this inward, selfish girl.  This cold person who finds the most solace in a black cup of coffee against total silence.  This girl who would usually rather.just.be.alone.

     The sun is out now, and warming my hands.  But the more awake I am, the closer my words stay to my chest.

     And it isn't sad, this alone.  It is not a cry for pity, nor for affirmation that he's out there really he is you just haven't found him yet but he's looking for you just be patient.

  Is he?  Why?

     The isn't to say that I won't fall in love again.  Maybe a thousand more times.  Maybe a million.  I love being in love.  I love every stage of it, including the one where I end up here, inside myself and writing, another solitary creature waking up with the Earth, watching morning birds flutter.