Illusion/ Delusion

I am feeling a little adrift this morning, no, a lot adrift. Eyes leaky. Throat full. Chest in a vise. Perhaps I have simply been quiet long enough this week for the feelings to catch up with me. I feel as if everyone is out there living their lives, doing important and fascinating things together, and I sit at my desk, day after day, writing a book, such a solitary endeavor, and yet it is what I choose. Still, I am lonely.

I know this loneliness originates within me. Nobody is doing this to me. There are people around. The man comes home from work every day and he is wonderful and companionable. I look forward to seeing him walk through the door come evening. It's like everything good clicks into place again, and I bask in his rooted presence. But then dusk comes, and the long night stretches out ahead of me, the ceiling of my apartment presses down on my head, and I realize I didn't go outside all day, and I think, what am I doing with my life? It is passing me by.

I did a story on American hermits for Life magazine once. I pitched the piece and then found six hermits to profile for a photo essay. That image of me on Knife Lake was taken while I was reporting the story. The photographer was the late great Brian Lanker, who is probably now dancing with Mary Ellen Mark in a grand reunion on the other side. Why was I so interested in the hermits, I wonder. I felt such a kinship with them. I really understood when they described the feeling of the world being too much with them. I was in my twenties, but already I had a tendency to isolate, to stay in my corner and away from social discourse. Writing is an escape in some ways, except when I'm stuck and trying to figure out the way forward, as I am now, and then it becomes clear that I need a fuller life.

I feel so tired this morning. My head aches, my body aches, my heart aches. Every day I hear about another death, someone else departing this world. It's the way of things. I am at that age when most of my peers are losing people. The generation ahead of me is taking their leave. I feel so orphaned, so alone. I understand now why my mother did not fear death. Most of her loved ones were already on the other side. She was sure she would see them again. She looked forward to it, torn because her children and grandchildren were still in this world, but she began pointing to the next world all the same.

It's a bit how I am feeling this morning, as if the party has moved to another place, and I am in the old hall, wrung out by love and wasted from loss, dirty dishes and half filled glasses and balled up napkins scattered around.

The truth is another kind of party arrives tonight. My son is bringing home a friend who is flying in from England and staying the weekend. He's a sweet kid who I became quite fond of last summer. Some of my son's other friends will be arriving tomorrow, as there is a big pro rugby game on Saturday that several of the camp crew will be playing in. So you see, I am not really alone in a physical sense, it just feels that way in this moment.

They say our human sense of separation is just illusion, we are as connected to the whole as water in a cup bobbing in an endless sea. But the illusion feels real and tearful this morning. This too will pass.