It’s supposed to be spring. But I hasn’t gone above 25 degrees F here today. When I look out a window, I feel like this rainy field Van Gogh painted while he was ill. I’m not ill. Just lonely. What a strange paradox! For the first time in my life I am in a serious relationship, I see the person I love to hold every single day, and I can’t stand my loneliness.
There were things that I could have, should have done to make moving here and living here for several months work. I could have made friends. But we’re such an oddly matched couple, we really turned in towards ourselves. Spending too much time together to ease the strain of the age difference, the cultural difference, the fact that we cannot hold a conversation together in public without a string of awkward silences, was not a great way to maintain a relationship.
What can I do but withdraw when we’re living with an expiration date? I stay because I care too much about him to go. But what is the cost of drawing this out?
Song
By Adrienne Rich
You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns’ first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning
An Innate Echo of Notes 