Solitude

Solitude. That delicious word drips through my mind and off my lips like honey - floral, lavender-flavored honey, the kind you can only buy at farm stands on hot days in the summer. Dripping down with it are warm, sticky, indulgent thoughts of what I’ll do with that solitude the second I get the chance. Maybe I’ll clean. Or garden. Or read. Or finally get that shelf hung in the living room. Tie up all those little ends that always seem to come frayed while I’m spending too much time out in the world. I can pass an entire day thinking about being alone, like thinking about taking a lover, thinking about when the supple but firm hands of my alone-ness will press their way down my back, over my hips, when its fingers will plunge into parts of me I reserve only for it.

But that’s not what I do with my alone-ness. Inevitably when I get home, ready to dip myself into the warm bath of my solitude I'll find it has had a bad day, or has a headache, or maybe I forgot to take the trash out and now it wants no part of me, turning a cold shoulder. So instead I’ll sit on my back stoop, chain smoking and anxiously trying to conjure up ways to woo my alone-ness again, the precious hours slipping away, my agitation rising when I realize it was never truly my sticky-sweet lover at all. Or rather, that it is more torture than pleasure it allows me, spiteful because I spend too much of my time without it - I've been neglectful. The cleaning and reading and gardening we were going to do together lie in ruins around us, unclean, unread, barren.

I sigh and grab my keys out of the chipped blue ceramic tray by the door. It's a hot day. Maybe I'll walk down to the farm stand for some honey.