A Letter - Part One

Of everyone, I think you might be the only one that remotely gets this.

Well, as much as one person can "get" another.

And even if you don't, I just need to purge my brain. It helps to think that someone is listening, someone who might just understand, just a little. I reach out all the time, just usually not to shadow men.

I really don't know where to start.

I'm spiraling inwards.

No, that's nothing new.

Even though my entire life I have been set apart from my peers, for various reasons, it just doesn't seem like enough sometime. There's not enough distance.

Or, rather, there's not enough connect, and the distance allows me to forget how little I connect with everyone else. It allows me to say that the disconnect is under my control, is at my whim.

It's really not.

I just stopped fighting it so hard. Just let myself drift away.

I spent my Saturday almost totally alone. I did not want to be around anyone who would attempt to talk to me, friends who would expect positive response.

So I drove. I explored streets and their curves, watched the people outside of my car. I enjoyed a late lunch at some little cafe on Sunset Boulevard, reading my latest book, enjoying the sunshine. It was so nice to go somewhere that no one knew me, no one was interested in me. They sat me in a far corner where, if I had chose, I could watch the whole restaurant.

I read.

And when I felt like it was time to go, I went.

A solitary movie experience, some movie and music shopping, and I found myself waiting outside the Avalon for a concert I had not heard was happening until an hour before it started.

It was odd, standing in their main room, watching this industrial band rile the audience up. Mostly because of the wide berth everyone gave me. Two to four feet radius at nearly all times, in a packed concert, full of kids jumping around.

After the show, I visited a new club at a venue I enjoy. Death rockers, the music was annoying and nearly undanceable. I don't drink, I don't socialize (if I can help it), so I left shortly after arriving.

It... wasn't a lonely day. It was a relaxing day, enabling me to get back to myself, enabling me to shrug off the taint of the views, opinions, and expectations of other people. It was so nice to not to have to put on a show. It was so nice being inside myself all day.

There was no one to reach to. No one to express to.

There are times when I walk, late at night, thoughts flying around my head. There's some pull in me to be somewhere, to do something, but it has never told me where or what. So I walk. I drive. I go and hope that somewhere there is a place for people like me, that somewhere, maybe one day, I'll find this place.

I'm always solitary. Usually I don't mind.

I don't mind that no one quite gets this disconnect. I don't mind that no one else seems to analyze the actions of the people around them as much as I do. I don't mind that no one can quite get inside me.

Usually.

Every so often, I run across someone and I know that they know.

I know that whatever it is that makes me this way, they have the same creature inside them. There's this unspoken recognition, this passing nod as we continue to be our own beasts. Smile for the camera.

Is there truly some point when a person gets so damaged, so exposed to something or someone, that they can never really rejoin the world they used to know? Am I to be forever outside of it all? I have been for as long as I remember.

Does it bother me enough to cause a fracture of self?

Hell, it hasn't so far.

Autumn gets to me most of all. Something about autumn makes me think of rain, finding overhangs and huddling beneath them. The winds suddenly change and I feel marked. I walk a lot in the autumn. Through my neighborhood, through the city. Just looking, swinging my head from side to side, trying to figure it out, trying to think myself into the right place.

I'm pushing off.

And my constant reading, is all that just an escape? An quick route out of my mind and into another's?

God, I'm too tired for this. I'll just write more later.