“No man is an island unto himself… we’re like a chain of islands… all trying to live in solitude, but not succeeding.”
They left early Friday morning. I heard them leaving, though I wasn’t quite awake yet. Then I woke again and heard them coming back. They must have forgotten something. Then they were gone and all was quiet and still and I was alone. I thought it would be nice, relaxing. And so I tried to make it be. I got up, made breakfast, had coffee, sat in silence. I tried to force it the rest of the day. I went to work, came home and had dinner alone. Relaxing, I thought, this should be relaxing. So I drew a hot bath, grabbed a cold beer and turned on some melodramatic music. This should be sufficiently relaxing, I thought. But my shoulders remained tense and my mind only tired. I resolved to a movie I couldn’t finish and a half eaten bag of Oreo cookies. An early bed time was in store.
I woke up several hours later to what I thought were people wandering into my house but turned out to be a sudden rain storm that had taken over the town. It was sunny when I fell asleep. How odd. I listened to the rain beat on my window for a bit, then fell back to sleep.
The morning brought a tad more energy than the day before but with a sort of sad resolve to being alone. I set about my day attending to business, school work, laundry, the odd ins and outs of existing. I ran a few lousy errands, pumped the music loudly, then decided it was much too loud and turned it down. I cleaned. I checked the mail. I made dinner. I sampled a variety pack of chocolate until my stomach began to hurt. Flipping the channels on the TV made me question life. What am I doing?
I had the “What are you passions? Dreams? Ambitions? And where have they gone?” conversation with myself. I determined to diet and exercise and loose weight, starting tomorrow. Then I sat back down in front of the TV with my variety pack of chocolates and watched the BET awards that had been TiVo’d. It felt awkward. Then I felt awkward for feeling awkward and that got me thinking about all sorts of things and I found myself sitting down in front of the computer writing this, thinking, “I’m going to post this on my blog and all the world will know I’m crazy.”
Yes, yes they will. And now they do.
