A Good Kind of Alone
#1
Even in their familiarity, I never know how to balance conflicting feelings. Peace in a time plagued by restlessness and longing. It pokes it’s head in the door unexpectedly, and you aren’t prepared. You don’t know how to greet it, or why it is here. You know it won’t stay long, and perhaps that means it shouldn’t have come at all. It doesn’t make much noise. You aren’t sure what to say to it. So you sit there, looking at it, wondering how to make it feel at home even as you see it slipping away.
#2
Sometimes all you have is the way the street light illuminates the space beneath it, and the way you turn the corner onto an empty road and feel a good kind of alone. When you see an older woman two blocks away, you feel a silent kinship as you each walk alone into the quiet evening. The way the colors of the sky turn, it feels as though they belong to you — because even when you wish you could share them, they really do only belong to you. Everything around you is for you, and sometimes it is only just enough. But it is enough. These pockets of time can be felt, and they are yours. Even if they don’t last, they exist.
#3
months pass
I see every full moon
feel the absence in every new moon
wait for the waxing crescent
sit in its light
the eight phases happen quickly
#4
Mary Oliver wrote, “just now it is summer again,” and sometimes I think this too. Clouds appear as formidable mountains, above tree lines, above everything but more sky: confidantes from another time. Today, the only hints of the season are those grey, bare trees against the strangely affable blue. The winding about of the invisible breeze. The scent of spring when it isn’t spring. Something about these days, though, reminds me. I sense again what has been concealed beneath leaves and inked pages. I forget every time I dressed in two layers. Something feels like a returned companion.
