so here i am once again on yet another friday -oops, saturday night, alone, in miami. lately I've been feeling like saturdays and fridays are the harshest days of the week. Every other day it's quite easy for me to say that I am alone because I am working, I am doing my thing and that requires space and freedom. Then Friday and worse yet, Saturday arrive with me having no plans, no where, no one, to go to or to be met by. And after weeks and weeks and time after time of people asking me ooh so politely, as anyone would do a reasonably decent looking thirtysomething, "so, what are your plans..."I've simply had it. For once I couldn't even "fake drive"... Usually that's my weekend vibe - drive around enjoying the natural landscape as the sun decends over a body of water, ususally either key biscayne or the ocean. Then, keep driving along watching people talking with each other, enjoying each other's company, and perhaps grabbing a bottle of guiness in a brown bag for the road. On nights like this one, when it really and finally gets to me, even the sounds of the next door neighbors brings the deluge of tears I've been doing everything in my power to avoid all day. And now here I am, thirtysomething, fairly ok to look at or to talk with, big hearted, willing to make friends, with none and no one to call on and no way to make any of these infernal Saturdays more genuinely enjoyable. I know no one who is as completely devoid of other people to even speak with as I am . My phone never rings, my email invites junk and perhaps two or three personal messages every few days. I religiously go for days, often, without talking to another soul - except perhaps the cashier at the grocery store who looks at me with pity as I bable into any form of conversation creatible. And yet, when I meet people they seem oh so intrigued and before the physical barrier of protection wove itself around me, they used to comment always on how powerful, how captivating, how powerful my presence. Now I fade, now I am the dark amoeba of the shadow of a person. I feel so empty and long for human contact soo much, my heart bleeds openly and the keys are a daze in the salt of my own tears.
When i was a kid and would run home to sit behind that one plush granny smith hued upholstetered chair with whatever new book I had secreted from the Center for Advanced Studies Library, I believed, quite often, that I went there because I loved it and that's where I wanted to be. It was only sometime in college, when my so-called friends were preening and preparing for something or other that they had been invited to that I realized and remembered my true reality which I have been afraid to say ever since... I checked out the books, I eagerly caught the bus home, I let myself in and curled up behind that chair against the wall in the living room of my parent's house, on top of the heating grate and read there, because that was the one place I felt safe and alone and like the combination of those two things there was somehow permissible.
