The rain was falling out out time with the beating of her idiosyncratic heart. The lights burned too bright indoors for her to see the blank walls with any sort of creative expression, so she dimmed them most of the days in order for her eyes to be able to squint and find in the emptiness a sort of peaceful art. She sat on this sunless morning, with her fingernail polish already chipped though she had painted them less than an hour before, contemplating the nature of the world, while dangling her head off the side of her bed to see if the rush of blood could speed up her thoughts. Like a wind-up toy in desperate need of a good twist, she let her circular marching slow and slow until she could stop and breathe, or stop and hold her breath long enough to see if the little girl with the hazel eyes on the other line had really hung up the phone. She had. She always did.
It seemed to her that young people, though she herself by all terms and by every adult in the entire world could too be counted amongst the youth, didn't appreciate the beauty of loneliness nearly enough. She felt that she alone could find amongst the waltzing of nothing but her thoughts a sense of peace that was eternally absent from the perpetual discussions present outside the walls of her head. It was many a night where she fell softly into her bed, holding nothing close other than her wit and her eclecticism, and being completely satisfied. Without the din of the ceaseless noise - she still could not fathom how they all did not run out of things to say - she could find commonalities with literature, she could schedule her own intergalactic pondering, and she could market her emotions as exactly what they were. Her options were endless when she had no one to answer to but herself.
This morning, while crafting her essay entitled "In Defense of Being Alone," with the rain falling out of time with her idiosyncratic heart, she shut her eyes and fell off into a slumber unlike that of the night before or the night after. She fell into a dream of a truly profound nature wherein, with her hands tied behind her back and the lights of a stage pointed directly at her skin, beading with sweat, she found herself wrapped up completely, thoroughly engrossed that is, in a conversation with a person who was not herself.
Upon waking, she blinked at the light that was now shifting through a nearly cloudless sky. The rain had gone and the grass outside her window was dewey and delicious. It could've thrown green lights against her walls had she looked close enough. Hearing nothing inside of her room, she realized that the silence in this moment was too absolute. Nothing was chattering, not even her thoughts. It perplexed her, as many things tended to do (facts of one's own mind are much more perplexing when your mind is your own best friend) and she stood. The blood rushed quickly from her head and the stars that popped up like nighttime diamonds in front of her eyes made it seem like she was far too empty to be standing. Quickly, and without any sort of warning, a thought sprang through her brain like a bullet through sugar-glass. "I'm lonely."
She thought for a moment, as she tied up her shoes mechanically, on the difference between being alone and being lonely.
Stepping outside, the sun warmed her skin like a hug. She hadn't been hugged in months. And down the block, a child laughed, pedaling along the sidewalk in unobtrusive, wholly youthful joy. She smiled at him and he smiled back with every fiber of his being. His mother, disheveled and full of gaiety, trotted along after him.
"Good morning!" The mother laughed as she passed.
"Good morning..." she whispered in response. For a lithe heartbeat, she felt like an active player in the game of someone else's life.
Smiling without any notion as to why, she began to walk.
People were milling about in many a listless fashion; but their thoughts could still pass through them as she found her thoughts still passing through her. Not mutually exclusive, she realized, were interaction and self-advancement. In fact, she pondered, I feel rather quite advanced.
Thinking, as she was, she failed to notice the car skidding quickly toward her as she stepped onto the asphalt, so taken by the child on his bicycle.
Had she survived, she might have made this anecdote the final point to her "Defense of Being Alone."
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