Nocturne

I will tell you this: I get lonely in the middle of the night.

Someone once asked me why I stay up so late, and I answered, "because I like to be alone."

"But don't you live alone?"

"Well, yes. I guess I like to have the whole world to myself."

I was thinking, recently, about the secret lists we make for ourselves - not the kind I often make here, but the larger kind.

The kind we live by, or strive to live up to, or live for. Like the list of things we hope to find in a lover, or perhaps more accurately in that more serious term - a partner.

Well, I don't want a partner - not yet. I am still tired from the last time, or maybe I am just still working that work that doesn't want anyone to get too close, because they'll only interfere, and it's vital that no one and nothing interferes. I'm fighting for my life in a very real sense, only not desperate the way that sounds. I've been working for a long time to clear out old rubble from under the structure of me. It's working in a way it never quite has before. It's grand, when I look at it from a little ways off and see the progress I've made.

But up close, it's ugly. And I don't want anyone to see that. I want to be alone with it.

The trouble is, I get lonely, being all alone in it all the time. With apologies for sounding like an ill-thought-out recruiting slogan, I've been an army of one for so long. I like watching war movies, but not for the usual reasons. I like watching because I can relate to soldiers - to men in a desperate position. To having to pull last bits of strength from hidden places. To bloodying my hands and my heart.

The difference is, they have comrades in arms. I don't.

I never have. I never will. It's not exactly that I feel outcast and alone in life; it's just that, for some kinds of pitched battle, there are no comrades. If there weren't then, there can't be now. That's just the way of it.

On some level, I accept that. I am okay with it. I am okay with knowing my own strength, and that it is all I ever had. I am fiercely proud of it some days, and sad about it others, and that is part of the shape of my life. If I look at it from a distance, like a work of art, I think it beautiful. I think, if this makes any sense, that as a person, I am glad to know me.

But damn does it make it hard to date.