And you, Mom? You knew that loneliness at such an early age. But you’ve never complained about it, not when Grandma was sick, not when you were nursing Dad, or after he died, or when your friends started to move away to go live with their children. Even now you won’t let the word take hold in the room.
That is certainly not something I expected when I wondered what the future would bring on the boat coming to New York. And it’s not what I imagined when Carole asked me if I wanted to move to Texas.
We never looked directly at the people who sat down next to us. I thought all these girls must have that same core of loneliness I did, buried under the layers of wool and nylon. I could see it in the smudges of black liner gathered in on that little bulge beneath the outer corner of each eye on the ride home.
In unconnected hours face-to-face, drenched in the ice-water of failed intimacy, alone finally becomes loneliness. My strong right-side withered under worm-eaten embraces, preoccupied hearts, and habitual sex.
All that energy scibbered away.
It sprung me: toss it in or let it out?
Maybe I could have spent it better
making something to hold onto…a nice pot.
Adults have different problems with multiplication. For example, divorce times backstabbing times sick child, times crazy boss, times stopped-up toilet equals chest-pounding tremors. Nobody prepares you for this kind of multiplication. When you lose the numbers you lose all kinds of certainty. For one thing, there’s no way to check your work. And no one wants to see your miserable little on-the-fly-process, except the doubt-mongers and second guessers.
The Avalanche of Loneliness in Small Matters was a little obscure; I can tell from your comments. It was fresh from the emotional soup pot just beneath my skin. And there was more in there for me to think about. My cheerful-most-days-nature bubbles right up from my toes. It’s a bouncy caffeinated energy that steps [...]