Wanting Less of Alone…
a practice in discontinuity
It’s no fun to watch movies alone. It’s like drinking alone. It becomes overly indulgent. Soon hours pass ,and you don’t recall which movie began when. Now, with streaming television and episodics and mini-series, so many characters and storylines overlap. They begin to live on in one’s dreams.
Watching movies and television alone was her addiction. Not mine. I long to appreciate this silence without the constant buzz of a television, but instead it is piercing a crater into my gut.
The crater is well, a crater — vast and rocky, a protruding formation now imploding on itself. Like my belly fat.
The belly fat grows. Daily. Despite constant coaxing of my thoughts and willpower and long walks on Burbank sidewalks and strength-training exercises on the living room floor done during this pandemic.
I had longed for alone time when we were together — and now all I have is this.
Emptiness: A void.
Avoid all engagements at all costs.
Solitude is pretty when you dress it up with heels and tiara and call it your own fashion show.
Solitude is monotonous when you sit amid it daily with nothing more than sweatpants and popsicles: Soothing your sore throat from the acid reflux and warming your thighs in the February evening SoCal chill with the wall furnace that keeps busting.
We always had heat. Not just
working central a/c and heat —
But also, where we lived together, when we lived together, was always warm.
