by Tanya Davis
If you are at first lonely, be patient.
If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay
with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re
embracing it.
We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee
shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you
can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse
the stacks and smell the books; you’re not supposed to talk much
anyway so it’s safe there.
There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself
and mirrors, you can put headphones in.
Then there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.
And there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if your
hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.
Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your
avoid being alone principles.
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by “chow downers”,
employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town,
and they, like you, will be alone.
Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.
When you are comfortable with “eat lunch and run”, take yourself out
for dinner; a restaurant with linen and Silverware. You’re no less an
intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the
whip cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at
full tables will wish they were where you were.
Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat
amidst a fleeting community.
And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you,
stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more
and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching because
they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human
intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after-all,
gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of
perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back, like a
book of blessings.
Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you.
Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to
talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared
existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting
and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might of
never happened had you not been there by yourself.
Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away
in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is
dating them.
But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely
is healing if you make it.
You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner,
look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.
But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your
thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept.
Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy
slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens
for holding the lonely at bay.
Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.
It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one
has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relived,
keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t
mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take
the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the
effects of it.
Take silence and respect it.
If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your
family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t
obsess about it.
You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.
If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.
There is heat in freezing, be a testament.
