Alone

I am alone.

Not lonely, just, alone.

     Sitting on the bed in my parent’s house – when did it become my parent’s and not mine? – with my mother away studying, my father out at work and me left here to mind the house, I am alone.

     Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I don’t.  I enjoy the freedom to stand in the shower that’s turned up just a little too hot, for just a little too long, languishing in the heavy flow of the steaming water.  I enjoy my malleable time, where everything’s fine so long as it gets done by the end of the day and then whoops I forgot and I can always do it tomorrow.  I enjoy the fact that I’m in a semi-detached stronghold with the cannons of middle-class bourgeois self-importance peeking over the crenulations of my memories of this place, so that when a cold-caller calls claiming to be compensating for a car-accident, I can comfortably say with a smug smile that thank you for calling but my family doesn’t own a car and no, thank you, I think I would have known if such a calamity had come to pass.

     I don’t enjoy it when it gets dark.  When I find myself watching for movement out of the windows, from the corners of my eye.  I don’t enjoy it when there’s a silence, and then a sound, out of place, leading me to question where I am and what I’m doing.  I don’t like it when I’m caught not knowing what to do, when asking for help by phone or by email would seem like a beacon blasting out an admission of helplessness.

     All in all, I think, I can’t help but relish this.  But then, I have to stop, reconsider.  I’m not alone at all.  There’s a boy, miles and miles away who can’t help but smile whenever I kiss him, on the tip of his nose.  There’s a girl, who’s not quite so far, who confided in me recently, worries about another friend in a chain of hope and goodwill.  And there are friends that I will meet soon, who are coming for fun and larking about  but who I’m sure will hold me up when such things are farthest from  my mind.  I realise that I could write and write and write about  the  people – who I know, who I’ve met, who love me, who  hate me, and who haven’t quite decided yet, but it all boils down to this.

I’m not alone.  I’m surrounded.

OK so I know you're supposed to tell people before any sort of long break in posting...

But this one was kind of unplanned.  Forgive me?
Either way, here's something I wrote and edited at the beginning of the summer to keep you entertained until I've processed all the things I've been writing without access to computers.

I see red.

                Mottled, streaked.  The sun behind my eyelids makes a strange pattern.

                I’m leaning on my hands, sitting back on a rough picnic blanket, bathed in sunshine.  We’re in the park, it’s crowded with families and friends but we have our own island.

                Twenty metres in front of me, there are dancers in the rapture of classic 40s music.  It would nice to be them.

                Behind me, to my left, a group with drums and tambourines, weaving intricate rhythms through the hubbub of chatter and laughter.  Next to them some people with discs and pins and other circus trappings.

                Footballs and frisbees fly and roll around, the gentle thud as foot connects with ball and the ring of calls to the other players cut through the air.

                A breeze washes over me, a welcome variety to the insistent caress of the sun.

                I open my eyes.

                There are five other inhabitants of the island surrounded by grass.  Three well known, two less so.  One is learning tarot, reading the fate of another not here. Two gossip, two read, and then there’s me.

                The tarot reader talks of gains and losses, apathy and faith.  The cards are hopeful, she thinks, head deep in a book that tells their meaning.

                The gossips giggle over a friend’s folly.  Deep in discussion and intensely interested in the other’s opinions and stranger’s situations.  I don’t know them well, but their talk is a portal to a parallel world of scandals and sweetness.

                The readers are intent, silent.  They are building fortresses of imagination around themselves, another universe that they will escape and destroy as soon as they shut their books.

                And I sit, and stretch, and see.