Salvador Dali  Head Exploding

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On Solitude

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I love my solitude. It’s a presence more than an absence, a place more than a state of being. It’s home. Like a snail carrying its shell, I carry my solitude with me wherever I go.

There is a door into my solitude. It has no lock. I haven’t learned how to keep it closed. Both Fear and Joy know it. Joy knocks, but Fear comes in unannounced. It’s lonely, unloved. I let it stay. ‘No’ is something I say only to Joy.

You know how silence is deafening when someone you used to talk to is not there to answer? Solitude can be deafening, too. I talk to shadows of self. I ask them about the amorphous burdens in their arms, their vague destinations. They echo my questions.

There are days when I’m an abandoned home and my solitude is Time, razing me to the ground, brick by brick. Then, there are days when solitude is the soil I grow roots into. The darkness surrounding my roots is filled with whispers. ‘Build something,’ they say. ‘Do it.’ They rarely tell me what—or how.

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are concepts invented outside my solitude. The world that invented them says nothing good comes from hearing whispers. The world I aspire to live in—that of books and songs and people who make something out of nothing—tells me to turn the nothingness I try to keep at bay into somethingness.

I’m caught betwixt and between—in a place where I use words like clay. I shape them according to rules made on the spot, rules that must be broken tomorrow. I try to build circles and end up with sharp, pointy things. Walls that crumble at my breath. Façades that hide the wilderness behind them. Windows and doors that open toward black holes.

Nothing I make is ever as good as the whispers. Every day, I take it apart, this new home I built around Fear. Every day, I raise it again with the hands of my solitude. Brick by brick. Upward.