There’s a beauty to aloneness I never knew I needed until now. I don’t mean loneliness; that blur of humanity swirling facelessly around you, your hands forever unable to reach out and touch someone. Forever unable to get anyone to just stop for a moment and emerge from that blur. That’s another feeling altogether.
Aloneness. The sky unimpeded by light pollution. Ears pricked by a chill wind and made pink by the harshness of coming winter. By all accounts the landscape is barren—tumbleweeds could be blowing by—but somehow a fullness is reached. I grew up here, in the foothills, in the scrub desert with its sagebrush and tall pine. It filled me up and I gorged my lungs on room to breathe, knowing that I could take a walk or a drive and find myself completely unimpeded by loneliness.
My chest began to constrict the day I moved into the city, and I haven’t had full lungs in weeks. I keep telling myself to give it a year, I’ll get used to it—but those thoughts just give me heartburn.
