ain't nobody like to be alone

The scary part about my life is that, given my joint propensities to tell needlessly elaborate novelizations of my evenings' activities and to tell beguilingly straightforward constructions of fictional characters' actions, I could just write fanfiction about my own personal, real-live cast of characters. They're practically celebrities to my friends anyway, known by a thousand names (Bert and Ernie, Og and Bog, Statler and Waldorf, Buy One and Get One Free, Frick and Frack, Thing 1 and Thing 2, Mike and Sulley (and Boo), The Two Stooges and The Three (sometime four) Bears) and by another thousand connections back to the core (this one wife, this one brother, this one "aunt").

Why don't I just make believe something fantastically wish-fulfilling happened to me, at rehearsal, and string it together on the page so I can read it over, and over, and over again, and again, and again? Why don't I coordinate all my most intimately choreographed coincidences to occur within the span of a thousand words, compiling familiarity and affection and sensation into one dreamy document?

The thought scares me, actually. And well it should - how dare I commodify those personalities which inhabit my every waking thought and steer the untrodden steps of real people, who've lived, into my ideal and idyll?

How dare I? How dare I, when these people have lived thrice the lives I have (with pets half as old as they, still greater than I)?

I already commodify, by even once considering that I could make into my family a gaggle - this one, so highly specific and splendid - of disparate acquaintances who've their own priorities and propensities.

How dare you want? How dare you need?

You want to be part of the group, one of the gang, but there's no way on this earth or any other that you'd ever be able to get there without first accepting that the players on this team don't frag out as an elementary step in their assimilation.

What you should do. Your shame. Your interpolated instructions.

There are no rules, for me, actually. I could do it. I could write myself a hug. Imagine myself a scripted conversation, confession from one small to one large that I cannot move past this hole in my chest where the horn solo lives and the breeze blows over contented faces.

But what good would it do? Would it soothe for a day, for a night? Would it get me through even one of those fateful car rides?

Getting over it really won't help all that much. It's three, four, five days a week I have to see them. I get to see them. I get to be with them. This privilege, this unimaginable gift. I don't like not being with them. I don't like me when I'm not with them because the me that isn't with them isn't anything much to speak of, at all.

Idaho. I've gotta move to Idaho, haven't I? Or, I hear, Seattle is beautiful this time of year. Was a month and a half ago. I've gotta go somewhere and be something, anything, unseen, so that when I come back, I've got a story to tell.

It should be me, shouldn't it, who moves to Florida and doesn't explain it. Who comes back and makes waves and says to my best friend, I've made you famous, now you've gotta start it up again, don't you see?

I can't make mountains move. I can't change the flow of any waterfall that wasn't already ready to start going.

I want to be attractive. I want to be magnetic. I want to be sufficient and necessary.

I want to be enough for myself and for every single other, besides.

And I could do that, if I wrote myself a story. How can I write myself my perfect story?

Maybe the scary part isn't that I can do it, I could do it. Even would.

Maybe the scary part is that I should do it - that the building block I'm missing is knowing what this future even is that I'm striving so fruitlessly towards.

Doesn't it just look like doing the job? (This job. That job. Any job. Idaho.) Aren't I just impatient?

Impatient with them. Impatient with myself.

Unkind to myself. Unkind to them.

Oh, god, we're all only just trying. It's not fair of me to ask that their trying be comprehensible to me; I can't even comprehend my own efforts because I don't know what they're aiming for.

What am I aiming for?

Strangers like me. A salve for the hole in my hungry heart.

I'm not sure who would envy me, a lost soul floating in the currents. Who would want to be me?

Quite often I'm not even sure I want to be me, or anyone else at all.

And yet, I know that there's a lot - so much - here that many folks would love to have. I love to have it myself - please, oh please, don't let anyone think I'm not grateful.

I'm dying of gratitude, of the endless tithe. I'm dying of having so much I can't half figure out what it is that I want.

I want love. I want to give it and to get it. I want it to be accepted. I want it to be seen, even if it isn't received.

Is there a me that I can be that looks a little bit more like the me I'd like to be?

What if I just let loose, and really dreamed? Where might we all be then?

Could be the same. Could be different. Gotta think on it.