To be truthful: solitude is not always
easy. It’s not as easy as I make it sound. Even as you crave it, even as it
soothes a part of your soul, that part that’s ever inundated with demands and
requests and the gentle, welcome pressure of family and friends, it still
requires courage, and hardness. This is my truth: I am soft, and I need to grow
a shell around me to withstand this. I need to harden up, each time and every
time. Even as I choose it, again, I recoil from it, and question what it is
that makes me crave it, and the hardness that it brings.
I don’t want to be hard. I am a soft-boiled
egg with a brittle shell. I am convincing no one. And yet here I am, again, on
the first of September, on the threshold of everything; again, an end and a
beginning, just like every day but more markedly so today when I choose solitude,
once again. With a twist in my gut and a catch in my breath – fear; loneliness
– and my shell not yet formed, still not set into hardness.
Tomorrow, I’ll be OK. Hard enough for
things to bounce off me, and courageous. Tomorrow, I will go around and make
this empty house my home again, and I will breathe a sigh of relief that
catches only a little on the way out.
I know how to do this, and I will do it for as long as I choose it; for
as long as the reasons for choosing it make sense. Tomorrow I’ll be fine, and
these words won’t sting as they do now, so they need to be written, recorded,
today, when they do. These words are my truth, and they sting because they
matter.
I love you all, and I miss you: everyone
who’s been and gone in the last few months. Everyone I’ve greeted with kisses
and hopes at the port, and everyone I’ve taken back there, with slower, heavier
steps and lingering hugs, and waved away onto departing boats, smiling, courageous,
with tears you never saw: it was never casual, when I walked away. The courage
might be real, but my hardness is just a shell, and I am soft inside. Don’t be
fooled, even as I choose solitude once again. You are the reason I can do this; you, and those ever-departing boats that will, one day, bring me back.
